Hacker News Reader

Comment by onewaystreet | Hacker News Reader

Daily Fantasy Sports probably wont go the way of poker for a couple of reasons:

1. DraftKings and FanDual are US based companies, most of the big poker sites were not.

2. There is an exception for fantasy sports in the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. You can debate whether Daily Fantasy Sports should qualify, but unlike poker it is at least starting on legal ground.

3. Daily Fantasy Sports has buyins from the NFL, NFLPA, individual teams, ESPN, the major broadcast networks, etc. Lots of peoples' hands have been greased from all of the money DraftKings and FanDual have been spending on promotion.

View on HN

Another reason is that playing DraftKings or FanDuel does actually make watching football more interesting- you care about games you otherwise wouldn't care about. Many people will happily continue to lose $10/week for the benefit of enjoying watching the NFL more.

Online poker isn't as fun when you're consistently losing money- there's no "outside" benefit.

By that rationale online sports books should be legal in the US (hint: they should)

Putting $100 on a specific football match at 1.5% rake is both more fun and more profitable than DraftKings/FanDuel.

Difference is: entering a DFS lineup makes you care about most of the games.

Moreover, online gambling will be legalized within the decade. It is already legal in NJ and NV.

The only reason why we banned online gambling was banned was because of Sheldon Adelson's lobbying, not because of some inherent moral corruption.

Yeah but the regulations around how it is legal is quite bullshit: in order for online gambling to be legal the entirety of your server infra must be within the state lines of either NJ or NV.

So you can't host shit in U.S.-east or us-west and serve online gambling stuff from there.

However if all your betting business is international, you can host in any aws region...

Basically all online gambling regulations are just as lame and corrupt as they've always been.

Yeah, there's no scare-quotes "legality" here, it's quite explicitly and and intentionally spelled out as legal. It's not some clever interpretation, it's what the law says.

It's pretty obvious this was a planned process.

A sobering reminder of the disproportionate power of professional sports leagues. MLB antitrust exemption, anyone?

(disclaimer: I love MLB, but c'mon).

There's also the fact that it seems extremely likely that gambling laws will continue to be relaxed, continuing to reduce their risk.

Fanduel is Scottish

Their engineering is in Edinburgh, and the sales & marketing is in New York (and much larger).

It came out of Scottish enterprise funding and is run by Brits, ergo, it's Scottish in origin but based in New York.

FanDuel is a Scottish company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com