As someone who worked in the Internet gambling industry and has to sit and see these Daily Fantasy Sports idiots run their loophole into the ground, I can only laugh. You can't flout your "legality" in front of a bunch of US Senators, advertise fraudulent returns, and have zero regulations and expect to get away with it.
Former Fantasy Sports employee (engineer) here.<p>My guess is <i>if</i> he did use tournament data from DK to populate a team on FD, he did it for himself alone. But he <i>absolutely</i> has access to all of the data they say he did. This is definitely a huge advantage for the big tournaments, because you need low-percentage ownership players in order to stand a chance at having a top lineup. It would help to see how the top players picked their tournament lineups on DK so you could extrapolate that into a team on FD.
someone please explain like i'm five - according to the wikipedia page, fantasy football scoring is based on the actual performance of the athletes you pick in an actual game. therefore, if the games themselves are not fixed, there should be no possibility of "insider information" - what information could the companies running the pool have that the general public do not? the article didn't make it any clearer.
I don't know much about DFS but it seems to me there is a simple solution to information leakage problem:<p>1)players construct their line-ups and have a local program compute a secure hash of it (with some player specific data in it like arbitrary 10 digit number at the start)<p>2)only hashes are posted before the game starts (or once a deadline for submissions is reached or w/e)<p>3)then a player is allowed to post a matching (to the hash) line-up<p>Failing to do 3) results in a loss.<p>Are there any problems with that solution?
I can't imagine these companies will be allowed to exist in the wild west for much longer. They are either going to need some strong regulations or they are going to be killed politically. It makes me wonder if the media rush they both started at the beginning of this football season was a preemptive move of desperation to cash in as much as possible before the hammer came down.
I can't really see the problem here. The employee made a bet. Sure, he used information not commonly available, but he didn't do it on his own site. And it was still a bet, not something that was guaranteed to win.<p>If I was employed by a horse racing trainer, and I happened to know certain information about the preparation of a particular horse, which the public hadn't factored into the available odds, and I placed a bet on that horse to win, there's nothing illegal in that (not in the UK at least). I'm in a position to act on uncommon knowledge, but I've still placed a bet and there's no guarantee the horse will win. It happens all the time.
This whole situation was bound to happen. As others have pointed out, this is an unregulated industry. I think DFS as a whole will be better off as a result this - since they'll be forced to securely store player pick data that can't be accessed by anyone other than the contest participant until the contest starts. FanDuel and DraftKings already have very strict internal rules about this, but I don't think their tech enforces those rules.. yet. Kind of surprising really when they're spending $15M a week on ads.<p>From there, I think the debate will turn into whether employees at one DFS site should be allowed to play on other sites (actually, that debates already on).<p>I, for one, think they should be able to. It gives employees the opportunity to experience what it's like to be a user of a similar product. It lets them stay up to date on their competition. And I just think it keeps people inspired. If you really like this stuff - enough that you want to work at a company that makes it - I think it's motivating to experience that when you can't use your own product due to its nature.<p>However, I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority. I think I actually saw that FD and DK have already banned their employees (in the wake of this) from playing on each others sites.<p>But to me.. that's silly. If you make it impossible for employees at DK to have access to the data ahead of time and vice versa, then there's really no unfair advantage. Plus, if their products weren't the exact same (and products in this industry WILL diverge), then it also wouldn't matter.
What does "DFS" mean? You're all using it in your comments, but I've only known it as "Depth-first search" or alternatively a company that sells sofas in the UK. Google and Wikipedia are similarly stumped.
I hope DraftKings and FanDuel followed the advice of a post on HN a few days ago [1] and made (i.e., didn't re-invest) some money along the way. Something tells me they're going the way of online poker in the US very soon.<p>[1]: <a href="https://medium.com/@dhh/making-money-along-the-way-did-dropbox-and-evernote-heed-the-lessons-of-flip-f5a133fe00d4" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@dhh/making-money-along-the-way-did-dropb...</a>
As far as I know, ownership percentage is available for any player in your lineup as soon as the first game begins. In other words, this is information is already public. That's what makes threads like this possible: <a href="http://reddit.com/r/dfsports/comments/3n1cdu/fanduel_percentage_owned_compilation_week_4/" rel="nofollow">http://reddit.com/r/dfsports/comments/3n1cdu/fanduel_percent...</a><p>Even if it were hidden from the public, it's fairly straightforward to reason that it is stored in a database and that at least one employee has read-access to that database. I would be more fascinated to learn that no DraftKings or FanDuel employee ever played DFS without at least looking at their own ownership data.