re: I mean, how hard was it to tell that Draftkings and Fanduel were a scam?

The Fanduel commercials say they pay out $75 million a week.

That's $4 billion/year.

Their financials are public and if you google them, the $75 million a week claim is ludicrous.

quote:

---

Message
by Jack Bauer7
is there a bigger douche than the guy on the commerical watching with his jersey on and hat backwards

---

I hate that douchebag

quote:

---

Typical Lib BS (courtesy of the NYT no less) that can't stand some people having fun. You know what? If people trust the businesses, they will spend money. If it is a scam, they won't. Who thinks that the architects of Healthcare.gov getting involved in this is a good idea?

---

Yea I don't get why the government would/should/could get in volved in this. Placing bets on the favored horse or the favored sports team is not some super secret. Like the Ultimate Hog said, go with PUBLIC stats and PUBLIC historical performances and you're guaranteed to make money by blending safebets with longshots.

This is hardly the same as using a company secret for a planned product or patent to invest before it's public knowledge.

quote:

---

Incorrect. This is a REALLY big deal. There are two ways these guys can use the information at their fingertips to leverage their investment into almost guaranteed returns:

1) Analyst A at Draftkings has access to the rosters of the "professionals" at their site--they guys who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year doing this. It's not an accident. These guys are balls deep in analytics every hour of the day. It's not luck. They win more often than not. They play LOTS of rosters in different levels of games with different odds and different payouts. They are dialed into the analytics of all of this. Analyst A takes those exact rosters and plays them in the exact games at FanDuel. Profit over the long run. Guaranteed income. This is exactly why it's very much like insider trading. They are using information no one else has access to in order to create a fictional competitive advantage in the marketplace.

2) The other way Analyst A is using the data is in the low risk "home run" games. If you know the percentages of play at your own site, you can use that data to spend very little money to create unique roster combinations that would pool the vast majority of the winning money in your account if your guys hit...rather than spreading it across thousands of entries.

This is a big deal. Using tactic 1 and 2 together IS (not "could be") lucrative.

---

Well I guess if you put it that way, they should limit the data visible to sets of employees. But, I can tell you the DBA and other programmers will see it and have ways to see it without being tracked(eg bury flat file exports in same modules of code that have legit sql calls to the database).

quote:

---

All I know is that if these companies are trying this hard to get me to put my money into their system, then it's probably to their advantage and not mine.

---

This is a bold take right here.

quote:

---

1) Analyst A at Draftkings has access to the rosters of the "professionals" at their site--they guys who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year doing this. It's not an accident. These guys are balls deep in analytics every hour of the day. It's not luck. They win more often than not. They play LOTS of rosters in different levels of games with different odds and different payouts. They are dialed into the analytics of all of this. Analyst A takes those exact rosters and plays them in the exact games at FanDuel. Profit over the long run. Guaranteed income. This is exactly why it's very much like insider trading. They are using information no one else has access to in order to create a fictional competitive advantage in the marketplace.

---

I agree that would be a huge deal; however, that isn't the information that was used or leaked. The guy didn't have access to rosters from specific players or from the "professionals" teams. He had access to the percentages of the players selected in ONE tournament that had close to 400,000 - 500,000 entries (the millionaire tourney on draft kings). In other words: in a tourney with 500,000 entries, he knew which percentage of all of those entries took each player (which % took Julio, which % took Cobb, Etc...); he couldn't narrow that down to specific entries to mirror their picks. It is still insider info that can be used to increase winning odds, but it's a HUGE difference than what you have posted in your first scenario.

Way too much bad information already out there about this, so I don't want people believing this is what happened.

quote:

---

The guy didn't have access to rosters from specific players or from the "professionals" teams. He had access to the percentages of the players selected in ONE tournament that had close to 400,000 - 500,000 entries (the millionaire tourney on draft kings). In other words: in a tourney with 500,000 entries, he knew which percentage of all of those entries took each player (which % took Julio, which % took Cobb, Etc...); he couldn't narrow that down to specific entries to mirror their picks. It is still insider info that can be used to increase winning odds, but it's a HUGE difference than what you have posted in your first scenario.

Way too much bad information already out there about this, so I don't want people believing this is what happened.

---

Ummm...you honestly think they don't have access to user data and roster data for every user? What do you think they are doing over there? What do you think their jobs are? Of course they have access.

Yeah, but I've only put in $35, and have won $2,000,000!

I never caught the full commercial. The commercial sounded shady from what I gathered from

What isnt being reported much is that the kid works for DraftKings, but played and won on FanDuel. This is big because on FanDuel they have an across the board lineup lock at first kickoff, while DraftKings allows a user to swap out players until the game that a players plays in kicks off... Ex... On FanDuel, Sundays main contests lock in at 1 PM ET, so players you want to play on Sunday or Monday night must be input by that time and cannot be changed at all. So this past weekend, say I played Marshawn Lynch and didnt change him before Sunday at 1, I would have received zero points for him since he did not play, and could not change him to anyone else, even if those players were still to play. The report I read Sunday evening on this issue stated that the kid played on FanDuel, and requested the information for the article he wrote (where he self exposed his "insider trading" by accident) after the 1 PM ET lineup lock had already gone into effect, meaning that when he received the ownership percentages information, it would have done him no good at that point. If that is the case, and he did not receive the ownership percentages before 1 PM ET, this is really a non-story. The rules on these sites clearly state all of the contests lineup locks stipulations on them. Now maybe this was a brilliant ploy to boost interest and exposure to DFS, because it seems to have a lot of people talking about it who seem to have little to no knowledge of it.


ETA: To put it in easier terms, it is like Les Miles getting Nick Sabans playbook 30 minutes after the conclusion of the Alabama vs. LSU game. It would do him no good to have that information then, so it really isnt insider trading. Now if he got that information before lineup lock, then clearly it is a form of insider trading.

quote:

---

Nice I play it too but haven't had that much success just barely doubled up since season started

---

If you've doubled up in 4 weeks, that's very successful.