Originally posted on 10/05/2015:

I am actually surprised they got fantasy sports off the ground like they have. I really thought the government or some third party was regulating it already. The commercials/ads/billboards are everywhere....anyway I see what the owners have done and they appear at least to me, to be following the legal framework to operate in the US. UIGEA states one player deciding an outcome and you have to draft a team to play DFS. Even if we are talking about golf or nascar, those all require multiple people in order to win.


If the employees are using the data and playing elsewhere then that is probably an ugly grey area. I guess in my opinion it is irrelevant if they are using that data to create a super team of contrarian players at fanduel or wherever.

There are odds services (free and paid) that are available for anyone that include lineups, weather, umpires etc. Just because you have that information doesn't automatically give you winners. You still have to apply some sort of knowledge/math/intuition/will to your decision making process much like in poker where sometimes the odds are incorrect but perhaps you think you have a feel for who you are playing against amongst other examples.

The only issue I see is if all of sports or the particular sports being offered by DFS are rigged themselves. That information would obviously invalidate many things. I don't doubt there are questionable things that occur in sports (Dony NBA, points shaving etc) but I do not think it is as widespread as some may think.

Just as a final thought I did win a little at one of the DFS (Fanduel...I posted the win here somewhere), but I am in no way an affiliate with them or even anyone other than myself. I literally can barely create an excel spreadsheet let alone run some laslow computer from the hidden closet so it is hard to say it is all a sham.