An open letter to lawmakers from a casual player of daily fantasy sports

Dear legislator or lawmaker,

Like millions of Americans I am a casual player of daily fantasy sports. I don’t play every day, I don’t play with money I cannot afford to lose and I stick to playing the sports I follow most closely – NFL football and NBA basketball. I have been playing at DraftKings for a little over three years. It’s fun. I lose some. I win some.  My current account balance is $254. I have made $100 deposits twice since September when football started up again. For my career in daily fantasy sports I am down about sixty bucks. I have enjoyed hundreds of hours of play for that cost.

I play in several “year-round” leagues: four football, and one each basketball, hockey and baseball. In these I compete over a period of months with people I know. They are my friends and my rivals. Sports are the basis of my relationship with many of them. We’ll text, email and call each other mostly to talk about fantasy sports. There’s not much money at stake in these leagues. They’re played more for fun than for profit. In that respect daily fantasy games are similar but that is where the similarities end.

I consider daily fantasy sports to be a form of gambling. It’s an entirely separate endeavor from my  traditional fantasy leagues. Each daily fantasy lineup is essentially a complex parlay wager on the performances of individual athletes on a given day. I have no relationship with the people I play against. They are faceless strangers with whom all I knowingly have in common is an account at DraftKings. In some cases my opponents are sharks – semi-professional daily fantasy players with thousands of dollars in play on a given daily fantasy lineup. Some of these sharks have upwards of 500 entries in tournaments I have entered only once. I am under no delusion that the odds are in my favor of beating the sharks. I play for fun and hope to maintain a stable “bankroll” while always staying hopeful of one day hitting a big “score”.

Needless to say, the marketing blitz that the daily fantasy sites have rolled out over the past couple of years means that I am not the greenest player out there. Many have far less experience than I do and are therefore more vulnerable to losing their money. FanDuel and DraftKings bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue by attracting new players as quickly as they can. The sites typically “rake” 10% of monies risked in daily fantasy contests so the only guaranteed winners are them.

It’s not surprising that suddenly daily fantasy sports sites are on your radar. If other forms of wagering on sports are illegal – and if online poker and casino games are illegal – why shouldn’t this be? Well, that’s the question I hope to answer in this letter.

Firstly, I would personally advocate that these other forms of gambling be legal. In fact, like many daily fantasy sports players, I played poker regularly online before the Internet Gaming Act banned it. Ironically, online poker was more a game of skill in my mind than daily fantasy sports now is. I certainly felt a greater sense of control over my own outcomes. With poker I was an active participant. With sports I am a spectator with an interest. I have long found it puzzling that daily fantasy sports were for some reason more acceptable than poker. I certainly don’t favor banning daily fantasy sports. Instead I would like to have the freedom to seek entertainment where I wish to and to be trusted as a tax paying adult to make my own decisions.

All you will accomplish by banning daily fantasy sports is to push the game back into the shadows in the same way poker has been. A ban would benefit casinos and off-shore outfits and provide you with less transparency and control that you have the opportunity to enjoy now. Rather than deeming daily fantasy sports illegal I would recommend that you reel it in.

Daily fantasy has a “wild west” feel to it. We’ve recently seen controversy emerged over “insider trading” within the industry and heard stories of sharks using computer software to manipulate sites to maximize their own advantages over average players. Some regulations are needed to insure that the daily sites are at the very least providing a level playing field so that the games truly are “of skill”. The first of these regulations should be a limit on the number of entries a player can make into a single contest. That one change would shift the balance of power within the sites tremendously.  Instead of being allowed to enter a tournament 500 times perhaps there could be a cap of ten entries.

There should be a limit on where and how daily fantasy sites may be advertised. Every state in which daily fantasy sports remains legal should tax the rake the sites take from residents of those states. Rather than limiting my freedom as a player why not put some rational controls on the daily fantasy sports industry in the same way you do other industries? I live in Colorado where recreational marijuana use is legal. The state has done a wonderful job containing the industry and making sure that it benefits the state. I challenge you as a legislator or lawmaker to see the positives behind the emergence of daily fantasy sports and find a way to capitalize on the game rather than removing my liberty to play them.

Yours truly,

A casual player of daily fantasy sports