Also there's fundamentally a difference between playing against other players and playing against the house. If the professionals on draft kings / fan duels got to play the house in a similar setup it would be even worse for the people playing for fun.
Why are people allowed to go to the movies? In New York a movie ticket is $15 and 90% of the movies are, in my opinion, absolute crap. So that's $15 with a 10% chance of getting your moneys worth and a 90% chance of losing all of it and 2 hours your time!
I think the one reason why it's different for the leagues is that daily fantasy doesn't really create as large of incentives to throw games or rig games as much from the refs or players point of view (not that it's common, but it's definitely happened in the past).
The fundamental difference between why that's illegal and betting on daily fantasy football is not, is simply that the anti-online gambling laws of the U.S. specifically allowed for betting on fantasy football and outlawed other types of gambling. When that law came about, I believe in 2007, daily fantasy football either didn't exist or was extremely niche. It really took a few years before big players like Draft Kings and Fan Duel got substantial traffic. When the law came about, there were a lot of small players who came and went.
The daily sites saw this exemption and developed games that push the envelope as closely as they possibly can. They've even added rules about not picking too many players from the same team as they are worried about that being perceived as a violation. The entire industry has been 1 jump ahead of legislation its whole short existence. In some ways they have been incredibly savvy, for instance they have financial backing from some of the biggest players in the US sports markets. That they allowed this idiotic behavior by the employees to go on for so long is boneheaded on an epic scale.
DFS takes applies the same principles of gambling and couples it with the most popular sport in the country.
However, I think the mobile gaming industry is probably just as responsible in this way. Clash of clans has people spending 50k+ per year (outliers of course) on the game and also tries to trigger a similar gambling-style positive feeling. They also are some of the most effective mobile advertisers tracking individual customers all over the internet. Do you think these "whales" get enough control on how they're targeted by companies?
My own personal subjective opinion is that blackjack, craps and especially poker all have higher skill to luck ratios than the daily fantasy games. Especially with the rake set the way it currently is.
Complete disagreement on craps. Could you describe the "skill-based winning strategy" for craps? (Other than "don't play")
For a long time, professional sports leagues in the US were extremely anti-gambling because they didn't want to be associated with it and they were worried about integrity.
However, the NFL got in bed early-on with fantasy sports, so they didn't fight things when it became clear that daily fantasy sports were becoming more popular, despite clearly being gambling.
Now, the NBA has come out in support of bookmaking. They were an interesting league to do that since one of their refs was caught tampering with games a few years ago. However, analytics in the NBA have become extremely sophisticated (they have tech that tracks every step each player makes), and looking back at the data, they could have caught that ref much earlier based on data. So I'm assuming they are confident enough in the analysis to thwart any tampering and are now trying to get into bed with the sports books in efforts to increase their revenue.