As it’s understood, single-player daily fantasy sports (DFS) has crossed the line into unlicensed sports betting, drawing the ire of the kingpins of sports betting—and of DFS—DraftKings and FanDuel.
DFS operators PrizePicks and Underdog Fantasy received cease-and-desist letters from Wyoming for crossing that line.
What Wyoming claimed is that the pick-em games from the operators bear a striking resemblance to prop bets. And that comes under Wyoming’s sports betting law.
Now Massachusetts has tuned its antennae on DFS play.
The Massachusetts Gaming Commission (MGC) Interim Executive Director and General Counsel Todd Grossman told the commission that staffers are taking a detailed look for any overlaps between DFS and sports betting.
“That is to say whether there are certain activities offered by DFS operators that may be considered sports wagering activity that’s been addressed in a number of jurisdictions now,” said Grossman, according to Gaming Today. He didn’t name any operators specifically.
Single-player DFS is in effect in dozens of U.S. states, including those without legal sports betting. It’s categorized as one player against the house with parlay-style situations instead of peer to peer.
Verse Gaming CEO and Founder Dan Zimmerman told Gaming Today earlier this year:
“The single-player fantasy products of today trample over the modern interpretation of fantasy sports…they pit a player’s skill against the odds, effectively demanding a user to beat extremely low probabilities on 3-, 4-, and 5-leg prop parlays to ever walk away with a profit.”
Zimmerman says it’s become a way for many players to “mix their single-player fantasy gaming experiences with traditional sports betting.”
What happens next is uncertain except for one thing: jurisdiction. Re-regulation would fall to the states, not the federal government.
“States that regulate fantasy sports would re-evaluate and reform their application and renewal processes for applications currently classified as fantasy sports,” Zimmerman wrote.
It remains to be seen if Massachusetts would be among them.
As Grossman told the MGC, “That is an issue before us that is starting to take shape.”
Gaming regulators in New York have decided that those daily fantasy sports contests that look and feel an awful lot like sports betting are, in fact, a bit too much like the real thing.
In an early August update to the public Register, the New York State Gaming Commission declared that the proposition contests found on certain interactive fantasy sports sites are “sports betting” without too much disguise.
Specifically, the new rules state:
“Contests in which a contestant must choose, directly or indirectly, whether an individual athlete or a single team will surpass an identified statistical achievement, such as points scored, are prohibited.”
Commenting period ends on October 5.
The center of this controversy, Underdog Fantasy and PrizePicks, insist they fall under the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act and thus not controlled by gambling regs. Maine and Ohio are also dealing with the same issue. Ohio is investigating a handful of sites mimicking what the regulators term “pseudo-sportsbooks.”
Cesar Fernandez, FanDuel’s head of state government relations, put it like this at a conference in Denver of the National Council of Legislators from Gaming States:
“There are companies today posing as fantasy-sports operators, and they are running illegal sportsbooks.”
