The first-of-their-kind regulations for the fantasy sports industry that Attorney General Maura Healey unveiled yesterday still leave questions for the state’s Gaming Commission to tackle – among them whether the sites should be licensed, the commission’s chairman said yesterday.
Advertisement
Johnson, the great-grandson of Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) founder Robert Wood Johnson, said it remains to be seen how daily fantasy sports might change the future of football. (It’s important to remember also that state laws differ in terms of defining illegal gambling.) Yet she is perfectly comfortable labeling the daily fantasy industry as “gambling”, which the companies themselves refuse to do.
“I think anybody looking at this acknowledges it’s a form of gambling”.
FanDuel added in a statement of its own: “Attorney General Healey’s approach towards regulating fantasy sports makes a tremendous amount of sense – it provides strong protections for consumers and allows sports fans to continue doing something they love”.
Fantasy sports contests could be viewed as wagering on the results of professional athletes, or it could be viewed as a competition between fantasy sports users over who can best predict the performance of a collection of players based on events that occur within the games.
Still, Healey said, she expects the companies to begin the work of complying with them immediately.
A Brooklyn man who lost money betting with FanDuel and DraftKings has sued the fantasy sports sites along with the credit card companies that lent him the money to wager on what he calls the sites’ “illegal gambling schemes”, new court papers state. Both DraftKings and FanDuel defend themselves by arguing that their contests are games of skill.
The minutes went on to read that Robins believed “operators should not need to operate consistently with UIGEA if they can operate lawfully under state law”. “Once you start having that discussion, you lose”, he said. Controversy is abounding nationwide as to whether this is a gambling site or one that offers a game of skill. This is nearly certainly true as an academic argument. “Here, chance plays just as much of a role (if not more) than it does in games like poker and blackjack”, he wrote. “It makes you scratch your head. Why is that so?”
Advertisement
Websites like DraftKings and FanDuel have attracted sports fans nationwide with the chance to win millions of dollars through daily bets against other players. The tech company, which announced in July that it was joining the booming daily online fantasy sports world, is the latest subject of an investigation into the legality of such betting sites. It seems poised to remain suspended at least pending Mendez’s decision. The negative publicity that DraftKings and FanDuel have inspired through omnipresent -and allegedly misleading-advertising hurts that cause. The MA government states that they were carefully monitoring the DFS industry from the beginning of 2015 and the proposal consists of suggestions that will mitigate the risks their study highlighted. But actions like Healey’s would allow the industry to clean itself up without shutting down.
