“The defendants’ contests are not a bunch of clicks of the mouse or taps of an iPhone; it’s what’s happening beyond the computer screen”, Kathleen McGee, an attorney for the AG, argued Wednesday to Mendez, referring to DraftKings and FanDuel as the defendants. “All FanDuel and DraftKings offer is another way to bet on sports”, a lawyer with the attorney general’s office said at the hearing, according to Sports Business Journal. “At the hearing’s conclusion, the Court determined that it would reserve its decision and that it would make a ruling sometime in the near future”. The suit alleges that Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and other banks are facilitating illegal gambling operations online by accepting payments on credit cards for the daily fantasy sites.
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FanDuel’s attorney, John Kiernan, focused on showing that players in daily fantasy affect the outcome of the contest and that those contests exist outside the results of actual on-field sports games.
Previewing legal arguments DraftKings will make in a filing Tuesday, Boies said the company will stress that its contests are essentially games of skill, not chance.
“Our feeling here that fantasy sports isn’t going to go away, but its just likely to get looked at state by state”.
The second question, which is being addressed by attorneys general across the country, is far more technical and nuanced: Do daily fantasy sports games fit the same legal criteria that other gambling activities such as lotteries, poker, or horse racing do?
Lawyers for FanDuel and DraftKings are urging the judge to let them keep operating in the state.
He also argued that daily fantasy has to be a game in which the best players have control because of the data of the best winners relative to the prize pool. One of those states is NY, which is where FanDuel’s headquarters is. We wanted to answer the core question of whether DFS is a game of skill or whether it’s gambling.
One of the most involved virtual spectator experiences is daily fantasy sports, or DFS. DraftKings has allowed them to play as it waits for a decision from the judge. Boies said statisticians he hired calculated that the likelihood that the same few players repeatedly winning a contest of chance was “vanishingly small” – about one in a centillion.
Traditional fantasy leagues revolve around the concept of drafting individual players to your fantasy team prior to the season and accumulating points based on how well your players do over the course of the year. Federal regulation that stems from the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, under which season-long fantasy is permitted but rules for daily play are not specified.
“I’ve been playing fantasy sports for over a decade, and I’m an avid fan of playing fantasy sports”, Levine said. That injunction would effectively end the ability to play daily fantasy here in the state.
DraftKings and FanDuel, the two leading sites in the burgeoning daily fantasy sports industry in which folks compete for cash prizes by selecting lineups of players performing in that day’s real-life games, plan to pay out more than $1 billion in prize money in 2015.
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Nevada was the first state to challenge the legality of daily fantasy but sought only to instruct the companies to obtain licenses.
