DraftKings employee admits “insider trading” on FanDuel, probably brings down whole industry.
Oh well. It was going to be banned as soon as brick-and-mortar casinos figured out how to make money off it themselves anyway. And at least we won’t have to hear/see those fucking commercials every eight seconds.
Random TV Guy: “I deposited $35 on FanDuel and have made over 2 million!”
Me: :rolleyes: Sure ya did. It’s just easy, isn’t it? Where is my Credit Card?
I was born at night. Just not last night. This shit reeks worse than my 4 hounds.
Some people will, because there are million dollar pools with small entry fees. It’s exceedingly unlikely, like winning the lottery, but it can be done.
It seems as though the solution to this is to just give everyone the same information in real time. Even if part of this company’s business plan relies on them entering automatically picked teams at the deadline in order to take advantage of guys that have better odds, this would at least theoretically even the playing field outside of server lag but the sites would have their well-tuned algorithms still raking in the “winnings”. They’d just be able to be beat by someone running a bot that had a better algorithm, but given that they’ve hired the absolute best fantasy sports players already, that seems unlikely to happen. And that’s even assuming that such analysis and “gambling” in its own game is a significant part of how they make money; I’m assuming it is since there’s probably no regulation against it, and they have the best minds in the business working for them, but perhaps they don’t like the risk it generates.
The argument that they don’t fall under Nevada’s gaming regulations is that their games are skill-based, not luck-based.
:dubious:
I totally believe that. The skill, of course, is to get a job at one of them with access to insider information and then use it to play on the other site.
The IL state gaming commission has asked the state attorney general to give an opinion on the legality of fantasy football betting in IL. They feel it’s probably not legal but lack the authority to act on their own.
Actually, the title of this thread is wrong. It is not rigged. “Rigged” denotes a system where the performances are altered to bring about a certain result. If the system is rigged, it makes it harder for the common person to win. This is not what happened. By having access to the database, an employee of one daily fantasy site was able to see the database that had everyone’s picks. By correlating the most common choices by the players that had a winning record, the employee could increase their probability to win on the other site, and they were able to do it.
To me this reinforces the contention that Fantasy sports is a game of skill, not a game of chance. If I have access to the database that tells me what the most common lottery numbers picked this week are, does that help me? Of course not. No one has prior knowledge of what balls will pop out of the machine. But with enough research, one can increase their probability of winning daily fantasy. From what I have heard, the company in question has banned all employees from using any Daily Fantasy site, which should alleviate the situation.
Also, as glowacks pointed out, making the data available to everyone would also help. I don’t participate in Daily Fantasy, just the regular season long variety, and the site I use, ESPN, publishes %owned and %started stats for each player, so if I am in a dilemma I can see which player everyone else prefers.
Except you aren’t playing against other lottery players. You are in daily fantasy. In daily fantasy, you can get an advantage by make a unique combo of players that no one else has.
Yeah I agree with that. There is no rigging. The only way to rig it would be to play off various NFL players. All the NFL player stats are available to everyone. Most people who play don’t look that deep into it. The only thing the companies have access to that the public does not is who their clients are picking. So that’s just a database of conventional wisdom. The players still have to perform. It’s not hard to decide to play Adrian Peterson. He still has to score in order for you to get the points.
How so? Those players still have to perform. To get into the top tier of the high paying pools you have to be both lucky and skillful enough to put together a lineup of players who played well that week. If you have someone who was a dud that week you probably won’t win. At least in Fanduel there is no advantage to having a unique lineup. You just have to have the most points.
You have to have the most points, but it doesn’t help you get the top rewards if everyone is playing the same players as you. Don’t forget, these guys enter hundreds of different lineup. They may not know who is going to perform well, but they know that if just one of those lineups does well they’ll hit it big because no one else has that combo.
That’s really why I gave up on daily fantasy. I don’t really care about all the scandals, it just got boring. You lose the excitement of one of your players doing well because hundreds of people also have him and it barely affects your standing.
still waiting for the stupid ads to end…
Yes, you have to score the most points, but to do so you have to separate yourself from the rest of the pack. In the big prize pool contests it’s called playing a contrarian strategy.
Valid points including the boring part. However, as below…
Sure, but usually there is a damn good reason why it is contrarian. It doesn’t take insider knowledge to figure out which players are picked less. It’s a safe guess that Tom Brady will be a more popular pick than Ryan Fitzpatrick. There are free sites that can get you similar information. It’s just a little easier to get it from your company and extrapolate the information for a bid on a rival’s site. I don’t see a huge benefit or much of any at all. Mostly their “advantage” comes from the willingness of individuals to risk a lot of money on many entries. Still not rigging.
I agree that “rigging” isn’t the best word, but considering that the guys that had this information did significantly better clearly shows there’s an advantage.
You would have to compare them with others that put in similar number of entries to see if they had a clear advantage. Comparing them against all users puts them up against people like me who has put in maybe 6 entries all season.