TRADING: An online fantasy football employee wins 350 thousand dollars on a rival website, sparking an investigation into the inner workings of the profitable business.
By Andrew Carlson, Staff Writer
Every time a football game is on television, one is likely to see a commercial advertising online daily fantasy football. The two major companies that are associated with fantasy football are DraftKings and FanDuel. These companies claim to offer up to a million dollars in reward for winning the daily league, and have frequently delivered on that claim.
Basically, a competitor on a daily fantasy sports (DFS) website would pay an entry fee, draft a team of players and get paid on how they stack up against the rest of the competitors. Drafted players score points based on performance and statistics, and the contestant with the most points wins. However, it’s not as simple as it seems. If a majority of users draft the same player, they are all awarded the same amount of points and hardly move up on the leaderboard. So, a major part of winning is finding those undervalued, less drafted players likely to perform well.
On Sunday, September 27, DraftKings employee Ethan Haskell won 350,000 dollars on opposing DFS site FanDuel. Since both companies forbade participation on their own websites, but allow employees to play elsewhere, it seems like no cause for speculation. However, another action Haskell took on the 27th was the accidental early release of data concerning how many people had chosen each athlete for an upcoming fantasy contest. DraftKings normally keeps this information confidential until fantasy players have finished choosing their players for a particular game. These two events seem connected, and in a very deceitful way. This is an example of possible insider trading.
Insider trading is extremely unethical in a myriad of ways. Insider trading basically means that employees of a company, or “insiders” buy or sell their company’s stock using information not available to the public. This is what Ethan Haskell is accused of doing. Insider trading makes everything completely unfair for the public. Online fantasy sports need to be investigated and possibly shut down if these scandals continue.
Whatever the outcome, online fantasy sports have taken a major hit in terms of integrity and more questions will likely be raised soon. Fantasy sports is borderline online gambling, which is illegal in the United States. This ostensible scandal will put more attention on DFS sports.