100,000 people paying $100 is 10 million. 3 places paying out, the top spot is $10,000, means at most $30,000. They’d be keeping $9,997,000 out of $10,000,000.
To give an actual example, yahoo has a $10 entry tournament where the total prize pool is a guaranteed $1m (they’ll add to it if it not enough people join to supply the prize pool). It caps out at 113636 entries. Effectively yahoo takes 11.36% of the prize pool if it fills up - if it falls short, they pay to make up the difference. The top 28,495 places pay out. Not the top 3. First prize is 100k.
The reality is slightly more favorable to the player than your “house keeps 99.97% of the money” example.
You can also enter head to head or 50/50 contests where your odds of winning really are 50/50. The smart players play most of their money in these games on a given day with some prize pool games mixed in.
What I don’t get is, fantasy sports are supposed to be limited to statistics of individual players (presumably to prevent something like “you choose a team; you get 1 point for each point your team scores, plus one team may get a pre-specified amount of points before the game begins; oh, did we forget to mention that your opponents always work for the company?”), yet pretty much every set of fantasy football rules I have ever seen require you to choose a team for defense (and occasionally kickoff/punt returning).
One-day fantasy games have two things going for them; one, you don’t run the risk of being in a “keeper” league where your players are busts and you’re stuck with a perennial losing team, and two, it makes Week 17 (and 14-16, if you’re not in your league’s playoffs) watchable, especially as teams already in the playoffs tend to sit their best players (which is why a number of leagues end in Week 16 in the first place).
You are probably right that the example given is ridiculous. But I didn’t see what the real “house take” or vig is in the article. I would love to see that–because that’s the bigger story re: whether it’s a ripoff, not the fact that there are so-called “sharks” out there.
How big were the poker sites that got shut down? Because in the month of August, DraftKings and FanDuel combined to spend over $100M on advertising. These guys are huge and they are everywhere. Imagine the fight they will put up against legislation.
I love fantasy football, but I hate all these ads as much as you do. The ad blitz has been just far too much (Yahoo is apparently also trying to create their own daily fantasy game, thankfully they haven’t put ads on TV yet). Matthew Berry, ESPN’s main fantasy columnist, got tons of (deserved) hatemail for “selling out” to Draftkings and incorporating them so much into his article.
I also second reading the Bloomberg article that BigDadWolf posted on what you need to know about Daily Fantasy sports. Basically: it’s like online poker. Sure, anyone can play and make a few bucks, but the people who win the huge prizes are the “sharks” who have their own analysis algorithms and submit hundreds or thousands of entries. It’s a job for them. The average Joe Schmoe is not gonna win any appreciable amount of money.
I wish I could find the article , but one reporter counted 19 daily fantasy ads during an NFL game last weekend. They’re plastered over train stations in Chicago , plus they cover every single mainstream sports website.
I hate fantasy football myself, but only because it gums up my google searches. Guys, THIS is Fantasy fucking Football. What y’all are doing is actually Spreadsheet Football. Get it right !
That is my congressman. From one of the few states in which online gambling and poker is legal and openly advertised. You think maybe there is someone pushing him to eliminate the competition?
I used to play this same method way back in the pre-internet '80s. It was fun at the time due to the suspense of waiting for the morning paper to get the box scores from the sports section, and manually tallying up the scores. It helped that it was constrained by the very limited information in the newspaper box scores, and gave a fun sense of suspense since your results and others in the team pool were not instantly known.
Today’s scripts and interwebs and spreadsheets? Bah, get off my lawn!
I got turned off after hearing weeks of DraftKings commercials saying “play for FREE week one and win $2 million” “enter code SWIFT”" so Im like why not?
I sign up, enter “SWIFT” and pick my team, but then hit submit, and am told I need to deposit $30 to play.
Looks like ESPN will no longer have Draft Kings sponsored program segments , although the non stop ads will continue.
Daily fantasy has made following and watching the NFL unbearable this season . Hopefully , this bubble will burst. I want to go back to whining about the pink.
I can’t STAND these freaking ads! 6 per hour! (There’s one on right now!)
Yes, I play fantasy in Yahoo with friends, but that’s just for fun.
And why is it called fantasy football anyway? This is Wishful Thinking Football. Fantasy football means I get Roger Staubach, Walter Payton, and the '86 Bears defense line.
ESPN pulling the sponsored segments due to scandal at DK. I read about that yesterday. At least one DK employee was using insider data, not available to the public, to play on FanDuel. And he won $350k. Not a good look for an industry already under scrutiny.
