Daily fantasy sports showdown spotlights NY attorney general

You might have heard that the NY attorney general recently threw water on the fantasy sports betting companies DraftKings and FanDuel by saying NY residents can’t participate in the booming betting business.

After NY attorney general declared Draftkings and Fanduel illegal, the daily fantasy sites filed separate lawsuits in NY State Supreme Court on Friday.

A state lawmaker is asking the Texas attorney general if fantasy sports businesses that put money on the line are legal in Texas.

Meanwhile, Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge is evaluating how to proceed. A lot of those people probably have accounts on both, but it’s still an bad lot of people, in fact, NY represents the highest percentage of Daily Fantasy Sports players in North America, according to the WSJ.

Earlier this year, a DraftKings employee won $350,000 on FanDuel. “Which is great news for anyone who wished “Moneyball” could be a bit more boring”.

The state argues the exemption doesn’t supersede Georgia’s gambling law, which defines a bet as “an agreement dependent upon chance” in which “one stands to win or lose something of value”, even if a few skill is involved, said Brent Holloway, a fantasy sports writer in northeast Georgia. In daily fantasy sports, players compete for cash prizes online by assembling teams of individual athletes to rack up “fantasy” points based on how those athletes perform in real-world games. “All your skill does in either a fantasy league or a poker game is improve your odds, but it’s still chance, and that’s gambling”. “I’ll leave that to the folks who know more about it”.

The leaked data contained information on which players were chosen most often in the DraftKings Millionaire Maker contest for the week. The limited research on the issue indicates that skill is hugely important to winning, but that could also deter growth as more players become aware of how unskilled they really are.

“I’m not going to use a several-hundred-year-old criminal statute that was written at a time when this kind of industry was never envisioned”, she told reporters on Wednesday, according to published news reports.

“We have ambitious politicians, elected to statewide office (as AGs), who think the public wants them to be prosecutors and think that will be a way to advance politically”, says SUNY New Paltz political scientist Gerald Benjamin.

Q: Is there any avenue available for these companies to get licensed as legal gambling operations in NY?

The argument can be made that daily fantasy sports is gambling, though the issue does not seem as clear-cut to me as it evidently does to the attorney general.

DraftKings and FanDuel have followed the rules as they exist today.

This month, Schneiderman used a novel application of a state securities-fraud law to press energy companies to be more up front about the business risks of climate change.