Daily Fantasy: You’re Screwed, Because You’re Supposed to Be
Perhaps you have heard of DraftKings and FanDuel, the two daily fantasy sports sites that now occupy every bit of digital advertising real estate not currently squatted by Flash ads for FACEBOOK OF SEX or SHOOT THE BENGHAZI TO WIN A FREE iPAD WITH HILLARY CLINTON’S EMAILS. And they’ve spread to TV. On reruns of House, the intro is now just Hugh Laurie looking at an MRI of a skull whose contents were replaced by the words DraftDuel. The twist is, the skull is yours. Sorry about the memories of your children.
If this alone were the shittiest thing about DraftDuel, dayenu, but of course it’s not, because this is America, where billion-dollar arbitrage contests outfitted with a media wing can always become structurally predatory and awful. On Monday, the New York Times reported that a DraftKings employee won $350,000 using his site’s proprietary information to make more informed plays on FanDuel. A FanDuel employee with access to insider data has also played on DraftKings, and both companies allowed employees to participate in daily fantasy while also working in it. We did it, folks: we found a way to gild that turd.
Daily fantasy would have been fine sucking on the merits. Despite assertions that it’s a game of skill, it sure seems like organized gambling, in the sense that the exact margin between making it entertaining for you and wildly profitable for the house has already been determined. Like any casino game, it sits in the sweet spot between systemic extraction and sporadic dopamine rushes. You’re screwed, because you’re supposed to be – unless you’re one of the skillful, lucky or sainted few to beat the odds, and if you didn’t know you were one of them already, you’re not going to become one.
How this works is easy. DraftDuel supply endless options, dazzling payout sums and high numbers of winners per game to make everything seem easy and tantalizing. I signed up for FanDuel and was promised fund-matching up to $200. Because I am cheap and deeply respect the Rolling Stone expense account, I chose to spend $10, but between the site not accepting my autofill credit card information, my having to find the card, then the site refusing to process the card at least a half a dozen times, the ten minute fund-matching window expired. (I’ll concede that I probably screwed up some small detail, but have your cards at the ready if you sign up.)
Immediately after sign-up, the site bombards you with seemingly limitless options of contests to enter, many of which are closing in less than ten minutes!!!!!! Every contest has a name like “The $250K NFL Bomb” or the “NFL Monster” or the “Crushed Cojones $1 Million Baja Blast NFL Crunchcrotch” or “Cleatus Fisted Your Mom” or other names related to sports, money and incredible urgency. Each one requires an entry fee, from $2 to Too Much For A Citizen, and each pays out X amount, with Y number of players earning sums that could be as much or as little as Z! Once a contest is chosen, the rules are like season-long fantasy: you pick a QB, a running back, two wideouts, a tight end, a kicker and a defense, bearing in mind that each player has an estimated value and your total must be kept under a limit. You can’t just max out the best players.