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. To contest DraftKings’s presence and win market share of its own, FanDuel spent $47 million on commercials in the month of September.
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Once we get past the obvious – yep, FanDuel and DraftKings are indeed sports gambling, which is against the law in most places – we can move on to the more important issue: should this sort of wagering be legalized?
Supporters of fantasy sports have long argued that a provision in a 2006 federal law allows them to operate freely in 45 states that don’t have specific prohibitions on the contests. “New York law expressly permits New Yorkers to pay entry fees to contest for fixed prizes”.
User questions about the new steps have added to the time it takes the company to process the transactions, she said. This gives them a major advantage over those who can only fire a single bullet, reducing the effect that skill has on the results of the contest. It depends on your perspective. You set a lineup, which may require a few skill to pick the best players. Craps and slot machines are considered games of chance. These top players generally wager tens of thousands of dollars each week on hundreds of games. “These are not moveable chess pieces that can be altered midstream or altered over the course of the games”.
“Millions of people across the country have played this game”, Spina said of the online fantasy games.
“(Q3) advertising was buoyed materially by daily fantasy football dollars, which we estimate directly drove 59% of overall TV ad revenue growth in the quarter”, Juenger wrote. “But just because something is hard, doesn’t mean that it’s lucky if you’re successful”. The law entitles New Yorkers to play these games. Even in chess, about 8 percent of the outcomes are decided by chance, he said. What percentage of tennis players are winning the majority of tournaments? “I think the attorney general has obviously changed his mind….” For those reasons, the Big Two will likely contend that their reputations would be so severely and permanently tarnished by being banned from NY that no monetary damages could later cure the harm. “While the talk now is about how the industry should be regulated, this is going to quickly turn to a fight for its survival”.
Above: Eric Schneiderman, attorney general of NY.
The Fallout The attack seems squarely on daily fantasy for now.
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Contests involving college sports would be banned. Boies, who once prosecuted Microsoft in an antitrust lawsuit and boasts a roster of high-profile former clients that include CBS and Al Gore, calmly fielded questions today for over an hour from endemic and mainstream media, including the likes of Fox News, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and MSNBC. Tuesday’s injunction filed by Attorney General Schneiderman says that the state’s finding is that FanDuel and DraftKing’s operations are illegal under NY law and they should immediately ban NY residents from playing. So much so that if Las Vegas bookmakers had to hang a line on Wednesday’s Schneiderman vs. Boies head-to-head match, DraftKings would be a favorite of Floyd Mayweather proportions.
