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Comment by jegutman | Hacker News Reader

Here's the simplest explanation. Neither should be illegal, they made a law that explicitly banned one and not the other.

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).

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I'm not going to disagree, but...we are chemically-driven machines. Gambling triggers addictive releases of pleasure/pain that aren't equivalent to most other forms of entertainment. Most forms of gambling are successful because they are excellent at delivering random reinforcement to players, which is key to many addictive behaviors. But the games themselves are not intrinsically interesting to most people.

DFS takes applies the same principles of gambling and couples it with the most popular sport in the country.

I agree with your general assessment. I think one sane area for regulation is tracking large losers and having mechanisms to help addicts create self-enforcement (banning themselves effectively).

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?

In betting exchanges you also bet against other people (with the house taking a cut, as with DFS), but those are banned under gambling regulation.

Some online sports books used to operate betting markets where you'd essentially buy options on teams, with the price of the option being determined by the demand. The house would make money on the spread.

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.

Its actually more specialized than that. When the gambling law was written fantasy sports was given a specific exemption because traditional fantasy was so popular.

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.

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