I thought for sure I was going to lose to a team who's so injured they may actually need colostomy bags by the end of the season.
I just started playing on Fanduel. Their marketing totally got to me. I bet between $2 and $50 a week and stay close to even, so far. Another TIB member that plays there told me he thought the site and the people winning were not entirely legit. Guess he was right. I hope these sites can clean up their act, I enjoy playing, but I want a fucking fair field.
Don't worry, he was playing me, and my team is a goddamn dumpster right now. To paraphrase Steve Smith Sr.: COOKS...TRASH. JEFFREY...TRASH. LAMAR MILLER...FUCKBOY
These sites aren't doing anything "illegal" as most of the information they supposedly used is readily available if you go looking for it. The problem with a majority of these sites is, the people who win the biggest prizes every week have large bankrolls and can use some simple excel based programs to figure out hundreds of lineup combos based on models they have created. There is even site approved web scripts to mass enter 1000's of lineups in multiple contests so you don't have to go through each entry one by one. The people that win the majority of the contests usually enter between 500-1000 lineups every week, spread across all of the major tournaments. A retarded monkey pressing buttons is bound to hit winners if that's the case. In reality, people are taking advantage of the fact that they have technological knowledge and disposable money, there isn't much in the way of "cheating" going on, they just hold an unfair advantage because they have money and time. If you want to make money on those sites and don't have huge bankrolls and tons of time, do the following. - Enter very few of the big highlighted tournaments. With 40-100k people playing, you basically need to hit lightning in a bottle to place high enough to make some serious money. Spend maybe $15-20 a week on lineups you feel really good about, but basically know you are buying a lottery ticket. - If you like playing the big tournament fields, enter all of the single entry tournaments. These allow only one entry per account and take away the advantage of being able to spam hundreds of lineups. - Play as many 50/50, and heads up match ups that you feel comfortable betting on. These are where the common man can make money. Pick a bunch of high floor teams, and just spam the lineups through these contests. - Watch the Vegas betting lines. If you are thinking of picking up a player and they are playing in a game with the lowest over/under, it's more than likely players in that game aren't going to produce as many points as players in the highest over/under. - Most importantly, learn how to properly craft lineups. There are tons of sites that offer lineup optimization tools to help you get the best value out of your budget. Also learn some of the strategies for DFS. Lineup stacking, points returned based on budget (most major tournaments you need all your players to return 4-5x's their cost), expected player ownership (this is what they are claiming this guy did, he knew that X player was owned by 40% of teams, so he picked someone equal value but less owned so if that player hit, less people are likely to have him in their lineups). I play every week with about $50-60 wagered for the past year or so and consistently average around $40 profit every week.
PC isn't that all beside the point of the article, though? Or are you just claiming that this behavior is such a small drop in the bucket tbat it doesnt matter? It's suggested that insiders are using proprietary information about lineup frequency on one site to enter lineups on the other, based on the assumption that the distributions are the same. That's almost certainly illegal.
The problem is that it's not proprietary. FanDuel releases the same information once the Thursday contests start so everyone has the info for the Sunday games. Also FanDuel and Draftkings use different stats and different salaries so they aren't exactly the same setup. It's also just one piece of drafting good teams. You can have that info and still draft shit for teams that don't do anything. Granted the info is useful, but you still need more than that to take down one of the big tourneys.
That's not what he's accused of doing. It's concerning information prior to the start of games. He's implicitly accused of actually using the unreleased info before the close of entry while "releasing" it just a little bit early once he'd done so before the start of games in what seems to be a ham-fisted attempt to claim that it wasn't insider information. Unless you believe that his accidental release of said info and winning $350,000 that same week are unrelated events. They might be, but that's a mighty lucky coincidence.
I'm aware of what he's being accused of doing. What I'm saying is that the info he used is available before the close of entry for the Sunday games, which is the tourney that he won. Him winning and him using the info are two separate things. Winning a large entry GPP on any of those sites takes an incredible amount of good fortune. Although the info he had can definitely help, it's not what gave him the victory. Also, nothing he did was illegal. There are no regulations for DFS, it's whatever policies the sites want to put in place. It's bad publicity, but beyond that, nothing legally is wrong with what he is being accused of.
I just find it funny that the US government labels it as a game of skill, rather than gambling. It's 100% clearly sports betting.
That's because the NFL lobbied the lawmakers to include specific language into a bill back in 1996(?) that covered fantasy sports. I'm on my phone so I can't find it quickly, but Deadspin did a whole article about how this whole DFS "thing" is all due to the NFL and now they're the ones making the most money off of it.
I agree, but I think sports betting is also a game of skill. As is online poker. The distinction being made between these things is arbitrary at best.
I'm no Mod, but I definitely think this case is better off in the general fantasy football thread. This thread is for shit talking and me scoffing at the horrible trade offers I'm getting for players people told me were bad picks.