Since news of player data leaks and alleged insider trading practices have rocked the daily fantasy sports industry, the integrity and fairness of these games have been increasingly called into question.
As national outlets such as the New York Times dig deeper with their investigations, it’s becoming clearer that sites like FanDuel and DraftKings may be catering to an exclusive one percent of players — many of whom work within the industry for the two biggest companies — leaving the remaining 99 percent to lose money with little chance at winning what looks more like a tilted game.
The latest report from the NYT by Joe Drape and Jacqueline Williams centers on a player named Madison Calvert, a regular participant in DFS games who had an illuminating conversation with a DraftKings executive at a private party held by the company. Calvert was discussing his baseball player picks for an upcoming tournament with Jon Aguiar, who then checked his phone and informed Calvert that the pitcher he selected was a bad choice because many other players had picked him.
“I shouldn’t have pulled that up in front of you, ha-ha,” Aguiar told Calvert, according to the NYT piece.
That plays directly into the suspicions raised by the recent scandal involving DraftKings employee Ethan Haskell posting a list of football player ownership numbers to his blog, information that isn’t supposed to be available until after the week’s NFL games have begun and all contests have been closed. Haskell won $350,000 playing on FanDuel that week, leading to allegations that he used data not accessible to most other participants to gain a competitive advantage and score big winnings.
Calvert told the NYT that days before his conversation with Aguilar, he had been repeatedly challenged on FanDuel for head-to-head play by someone whom he discovered was a business planning manager at DraftKings. That led Calvert to feel as if he’d been targeted as a subpar player based on his lack of success, an easy target for a predator with knowledge that gave him a distinct edge in any contest.
The two incidents led Calvert to the conclusion that lower-level players like himself had no chance against the upper echelon of DFS winners armed with additional data and computer programs allowing them to quickly cycle through lineups, check player availability and identify those who didn’t fare well in the daily fantasy games.
By most measures, Calvert was even a moderately successful player, earning VIP status at DraftKings — though that was based on the number of games he played, and likely the amount of money he invested in the practice. But between his losses and the realization that he was participating in contests that appeared increasingly unfair, he decided to quit playing. The question now becomes how many could eventually join him, either if they come to the same understanding or if investigations by the media — and possibly the government — make DFS seem like a more unappealing diversion each week.