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NFL Anti-Thread: Sponsored by FanKings


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The potential charges seem specious. What information, exactly, would this guy have that would make it insider trading? It sounds like he kept stats for his company and used the info he gathered. If that were the case, any guy with Microsoft Excel and an unfulfilling job could spend his entire day entering and tracking stats to get the same information. I can't see what exactly was illegal here.

Used the company's proprietary ranking algorithms in order to do that.

It's kind of why its considered bad form for members of the casino staff to play the slots at that casino.

Yeah, but these aren't random outcomes in the way gambling is. Winning still requires the player being healthy and producing, and what he's done previously is far less telling of what he's going to do in a given week.

MOD EDIT The reason I went for the slots analogy is that they are rigged on when to pay out, etc. and casino employees are the ones who would know that. If you've got access to the kind of data the "DraftDuel" employees do, that would give them an unfair advantage if they were to compete. Which is basically insider trading...acting on information you would not be in a position to have unless you worked at the company.

I don't think the insult was particularly necessary. I know what you were getting at with slots, and I don't think this is at all similar. Unless these bets are something outside of the normal realm of fantasy football, they still require the players to perform. It's not like there's an algorithm which will show you that Kirk Cousins will help you destroy a league despite the fact that he's a poor QB and puts up bad numbers.

I don't play fantasy football. Unless I've missed something here and these websites allow wagering on simulations instead of real players' performances from a given day, I can't see how an algorithm would give them information not available to the general public if they cared enough to find it.

The way the daily fantasy works is this-you're basically picking a lineup of players and (oh what the hell, it's gambling anyway) betting that your lineup will outperform everyone else's in the league(s) you have entered. The problem is that, unlike normal fantasy, there is no player scarcity. Every team in the "league," for example, could have Aaron Rodgers on it. So the league winners are going to be the ones who picked all of the good players, based on how they do the scoring, in a given week, not just one or two. Now yes, this is something that anybody with enough time and spreadsheets could figure out how to excel at (which is why something like 90+% of the winnings are concentrated in the hands of considerably less than 5% of the players), but if you work at the company, you're going to get a lot of that knowledge, plus figure out how to best work the scoring system, without doing all of that work.

That's not kosher, just like how surmising that a company's stock is about to take a tumble by, I dunno watching C-Span to see that Congress is about to kneecap some business sector or another or using other publicly available information to do so may be permissible, yet selling your stock because you heard from your CEO uncle who heard privately from Senator Jones that "we're totally going to kneecap you dude, so get out now" isn't.

Anywho, despite the initial New York complaint, it sounds like a number of "DraftDuel" employees are in that "less than 5%" who are cleaning up, so, um, yeah that's a sign there is a problem here.

On 8/1/2010 at 4:01 PM, winters in buffalo said:
You manage to balance agitation with just enough salient points to keep things interesting. Kind of a low-rent DG_Now.
On 1/2/2011 at 9:07 PM, Sodboy13 said:
Today, we are all otaku.

"The city of Peoria was once the site of the largest distillery in the world and later became the site for mass production of penicillin. So it is safe to assume that present-day Peorians are descended from syphilitic boozehounds."-Stephen Colbert

POTD: February 15, 2010, June 20, 2010

The Glorious Bloom State Penguins (NCFAF) 2014: 2-9, 2015: 7-5 (L Pineapple Bowl), 2016: 1-0 (NCFAB) 2014-15: 10-8, 2015-16: 14-5 (SMC Champs, L 1st Round February Frenzy)

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Here's Jeb Lund on the whole thing, boldface is mine:

Which is why DraftKings employees using in-house data to compete on FanDuel is not only fantastically :censored:ty, but familiarly so. It amplifies what already sucks about the contest and just adds insider trading to it. If people running scripts or being able to create their own proprietary data pool already makes the contest structurally unfair, someone just taking the data that other gamblers voluntarily remit to sites like DraftDuel nauseatingly resembles Wall Street's normative levels of white-collar crime. In short, they were always going to :censored: the little guy, but they cheated because winning an already rigged game the already easy way was somehow too damn hard. The Wall Street Journal reports that daily fantasy is projected to generate $2.5 billion in annual revenue by 2020. By 2028, someone illegally trading with it should be nominated Secretary of the Treasury.

That projected $2.5 billion matters, because numbers like that are what protect businesses from being filleted, fined and regulated by whatever passes for justice anymore. Comcast and NBC Sports are invested in FanDuel, and Fox Sports has invested in DraftKings, with ESPN signing an exclusive advertising contract with them. Major League Baseball and the NFL are also invested in DraftKings, as are Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. There are other contracts with the NHL and NBA. The number of actors and amount of capital behind them invested in the perpetuation of DraftDuel is the sort of brick-weight of cash that displaces and disperses a lot of hassle.

. . .

Because nothing crowds out or deafens scrutiny like loudness and repetition. This is how Planned Parenthood carves out a living selling baby brains for cash, Tim Tebow just wins ballgames and The Big Bang Theory is television's best sitcom. The DraftDuel experience really is the Number One fan experience, you can just sign up and start winning today, the deck is not already stacked in favor of the house, not further stacked in favor of script-kiddies with math degrees, not stacked yet further in favor of institutional manipulation, and everyone is going to make a lot of money. And those people are definitely not DraftKings, FanDuel, Jerry Jones, Robert Kraft, NBC/Comcast, Fox Sports and ESPN. Baby, it's you.

America ruins everything.

this is something that anybody with enough time and spreadsheets could figure out how to excel at

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♫ oh yeah, board goes on, long after the thrill of postin' is gone ♫

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Okay, but I imagine it's like regular fantasy football in that players have a salary cap of sorts, or something requiring them to choose players wisely and not just letting them select the top player across the board. If so, each player would have their stated worth (in how much money/points you spent to acquire them), and it would still be about fitting the pieces of the puzzle together to guess who would have the best performance on a given day based off of the time, location, and team faced. So long as the league has transparent scoring an uniform points given for yards and scores, there's not some hidden advantage. If a player starts putting up huge numbers, his cap value will go up.

Anyone willing to work hard enough could access the information these people are using. It's gambling, for sure. But in going up against someone who has access to more information than you, you're not getting screwed. Fantasy football is a huge business for not only the operating sites, but for websites and publication which rank players and give recommendations. My in-laws are huge into it. They spend weeks studying before the draft, then spend additional time each week looking at stats, rankings and publications when deciding who to start and who to trade. And they generally do very well in their leagues. So sure, you could pick players at random and win. But a big part of it is skill. You're going to do considerably better in the long run if you understand it, work at it and study it. Anybody playing fantasy football should know that. Someone who picks a team arbitrarily in August and checks their score once a week is probably going to do much worse than someone who studies it and knows the intricacies. They know this. I don't think anybody is getting cheated.

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Okay, but I imagine it's like regular fantasy football in that players have a salary cap of sorts, or something requiring them to choose players wisely and not just letting them select the top player across the board. If so, each player would have their stated worth (in how much money/points you spent to acquire them), and it would still be about fitting the pieces of the puzzle together to guess who would have the best performance on a given day based off of the time, location, and team faced. So long as the league has transparent scoring an uniform points given for yards and scores, there's not some hidden advantage. If a player starts putting up huge numbers, his cap value will go up.

Anyone willing to work hard enough could access the information these people are using. It's gambling, for sure. But in going up against someone who has access to more information than you, you're not getting screwed. Fantasy football is a huge business for not only the operating sites, but for websites and publication which rank players and give recommendations. My in-laws are huge into it. They spend weeks studying before the draft, then spend additional time each week looking at stats, rankings and publications when deciding who to start and who to trade. And they generally do very well in their leagues. So sure, you could pick players at random and win. But a big part of it is skill. You're going to do considerably better in the long run if you understand it, work at it and study it. Anybody playing fantasy football should know that. Someone who picks a team arbitrarily in August and checks their score once a week is probably going to do much worse than someone who studies it and knows the intricacies. They know this. I don't think anybody is getting cheated.

By this logic, you aren't getting screwed by the casino when you go into the casino because you know the casino will screw you.

There is a huge hidden disadvantage. While the number of leagues you can enter and player pool is unlimited, the prize pool isn't. Yeah, your friends in their 12 team league may spend a lot of effort each year, but they are competing against a very limited pool of competitors operating with the same information and time resources, and a limited player pool(so odds of a mad genius with a Cray winning it all are low). Since the number of leagues any one person can enter is limited only by the capabilities of whatever bot they can write to perform entries, we've just figured out why so few people actually win-the same guys enter all the leagues. And if the staff is armed with that same information without even making that effort, well, that means the majority's chances of actually showing a profit got even lower.

In addition, the Libertarian Consenting Adult argument runs aground because (as usual) it assumes everyone has perfect information and guess what, everyone doesn't. Because, unfortunately the "DraftDuel" advertising blitz, in addition to making you think long and hard about whether the 1st Amendment as currently interpreted is actually a good idea, fails to mention that you are going to be competing against people armed with a lot more information and instead promise you easy cash for little effort. Since we don't have the inured generational understanding of what casinos do in play here, there is a problem.

On 8/1/2010 at 4:01 PM, winters in buffalo said:
You manage to balance agitation with just enough salient points to keep things interesting. Kind of a low-rent DG_Now.
On 1/2/2011 at 9:07 PM, Sodboy13 said:
Today, we are all otaku.

"The city of Peoria was once the site of the largest distillery in the world and later became the site for mass production of penicillin. So it is safe to assume that present-day Peorians are descended from syphilitic boozehounds."-Stephen Colbert

POTD: February 15, 2010, June 20, 2010

The Glorious Bloom State Penguins (NCFAF) 2014: 2-9, 2015: 7-5 (L Pineapple Bowl), 2016: 1-0 (NCFAB) 2014-15: 10-8, 2015-16: 14-5 (SMC Champs, L 1st Round February Frenzy)

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By this logic, you aren't getting screwed by the casino when you go into the casino because you know the casino will screw you.

No, because at a slot machine there is no amount of studying which would give you an advantage. Any given pulls or series of pulls gives a random outcome and there's no way to game the system. Anybody playing fantasy football should understand that there's an amount of skill which goes along with the luck or randomness of a player's performance on a given day. And if there wasn't it would explicitly be gambling by definition, and it would be covered by the casino understanding, as you said.

I don't think this requires a "smoking is bad" type disclaimer. There is a skill to selecting the players. I understand that and I've never played fantasy football. If someone doesn't understand that and loses $25 or $2,500 on DFS, that's their problem. My biggest thing is that the results are ultimately determined on the field. Until we find out that these leagues are somehow influencing the NFL and effectively fixing the games, I don't think they were cheated.

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There's a skill to playing poker, too. That skill is enhanced by mathematical study and processing algorithms. Use of such algorithms allows a select few to clean up regularly playing online poker against less-informed, casual players.

Playing online poker for money in the United States is 100% mega-illegal.

On 1/25/2013 at 1:53 PM, 'Atom said:

For all the bird de lis haters I think the bird de lis isnt supposed to be a pelican and a fleur de lis I think its just a fleur de lis with a pelicans head. Thats what it looks like to me. Also the flair around the tip of the beak is just flair that fleur de lis have sometimes source I am from NOLA.

PotD: 10/19/07, 08/25/08, 07/22/10, 08/13/10, 04/15/11, 05/19/11, 01/02/12, and 01/05/12.

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I understand that, and I feel similarly that anyone upset about losing a bunch of money to the house (or other players) at poker is a dope. I wouldn't have an issue with them making FF illegal, either.

Like with poker, the dad from Makato who puts money down on a whim should reasonably understand that there's a good chance someone at the table with him is better prepared than himself. So, sure, he could still be dealt a full house and win, just like he could draft Eddie Royal and have him go for 150 yards and two scores. But if he sits at that table for a long time, it's likely someone who understands it better would come out on top.

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Yeah, but DFS winners aren't winning because they know football. They're winning because they know math. The results are basically immaterial.

1 hour ago, ShutUpLutz! said:

and the drunken doodoobags jumping off the tops of SUV's/vans/RV's onto tables because, oh yeah, they are drunken drug abusing doodoobags

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"You Aren't Good Enough to Win Money Playing Daily Fantasy Football"

The top 100 ranked players enter 330 winning lineups per day, and the top 10 players combine to win an average of 873 times daily. The remaining field of approximately 20,000 players tracked by Rotogrinders wins just 13 times per day, on average.

Bloomberg, via Deadspin

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-10/you-aren-t-good-enough-to-win-money-playing-daily-fantasy-football

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  • 2 weeks later...

Bears cut Jeremiah Ratliff after he got into a physical confrontation with the general manager and the cops had to be called. I smell a future Glorious Oakland Raider!

♫ oh yeah, board goes on, long after the thrill of postin' is gone ♫

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Hey guys! It's not massive brain injuries that are causing these problems for retired players, it's being sad they don't get to do :censored: like Hard Knocks anymore!

http://deadspin.com/nfl-backs-scientist-who-explains-cte-as-ex-nflers-being-1738544929

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On 11/19/2012 at 7:23 PM, oldschoolvikings said:
She’s still half convinced “Chris Creamer” is a porn site.)
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http://www.towleroad.com/2015/10/houston-texans-owner-wants-his-10k-donation-to-anti-lgbt-group-refunded/

What he really means is he got called out on his bs and now he wants to back track.

"... an incontinent water buffalo after an ex-lax smoothie"? An early favorite in the GToV, methinks.
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Anybody in San Diego want a CFL franchise?

Because the Chargers simply can't do anything right today.

Maybe the Fabiani announcement that the Chargers are applying to relocate come January has something to do with it. I expect similar downturns from St. Louis and/or Oakland when relocation announcements come public. It happened to the Browns (v1.0) when Modell announced that move in 1995.

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AKA @LanRovr0 on Twitter

LED Sig Credits to packerfan21396

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Anybody in San Diego want a CFL franchise?

Because the Chargers simply can't do anything right today.

Maybe the Fabiani announcement that the Chargers are applying to relocate come January has something to do with it. I expect similar downturns from St. Louis and/or Oakland when relocation announcements come public. It happened to the Browns (v1.0) when Modell announced that move in 1995.

Fabiani is really just a marionette used by the team ownership to spin a new yarn of indecision every week.

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You think you're all funny and stuff but you're not. :mad:

Chicago Bears fail to paint straight lines. The best picture is the one of the guy trying to sweep the line back into place. The Raiders field crew protested the NFL. The Bears field crew protested geometry.

♫ oh yeah, board goes on, long after the thrill of postin' is gone ♫

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