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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday November 11 2015, @04:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the is-it-fantasy-money-too dept.

The New York Times reports that in a major blow to a multibillion-dollar industry that introduced sports betting to legions of young sports fans, the New York State attorney general has ordered the two biggest daily fantasy sports companies, DraftKings and FanDuel, to stop accepting bets from New York residents, saying their games constituted illegal gambling under state law. "It is clear that DraftKings and FanDuel are the leaders of a massive, multibillion-dollar scheme intended to evade the law and fleece sports fans across the country," says NY attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, "Today we have sent a clear message: not in New York, and not on my watch."

Fantasy sports companies contend that their games are not gambling because they involve more skill than luck and were legally sanctioned by a 2006 federal law that exempted fantasy sports from a prohibition against processing online financial wagering. "Fantasy sports is a game of skill and legal under New York state law," says FanDuel. "This is a politician telling hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers they are not allowed to play a game they love and share with friends, family, co-workers and players across the country." The attorney general's office also said that ads on the two sites "seriously mislead New York citizens about their prospects of winning." State investigators found that to date, "the top 1 percent of DraftKings winners receive the vast majority of the winnings." Schneiderman's investigation was spurred after reports arose that a DraftKings employee used internal data to win $350,000 on rival site FanDuel, which the operators denied. While both companies had allowed employees to place bets on the others site, they have since banned such practices.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 12 2015, @03:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 12 2015, @03:27PM (#262175)

    has the same intensity player on player impacts,

    No, this is not correct. American football has much more violent impacts facilitated by the extra padding. The irony in that sport is that the extra padding has actually made it more dangerous to the players. All the helmet does is keep your head from being split open, but that force still has to go somewhere. The football helmet of the last several decades, complete with reinforced facemask and backed by the neckroll, have led to very violent head-first hits and tackles, which is an issue the NFL is having a tough time getting rid of (it is an interesting conundrum they are in where they are trying to eliminate these hits in the name of player safety, but they also make a lot of money glorifying these hits in highlight reels). Some coaches are trying to return to the sport's roots and teach proper rugby-style shoulder-based tackling [nbcsports.com].

    From a player safety standpoint, the best thing the NFL could do (in my opinion) is to reduce the amount of padding. Get rid of the facemask, for instance, if you don't want head-first tackles, but you'd probably have to go back to soft helmets so that you don't take a hard plastic helmet to the teeth. However, it is tough to compare across sports when it comes to things like concussions because there is no standard way of recognizing and diagnosing them. Concussions have become a big issue in both the NFL and Rugby Union, but it is really hard to compare them as to which is "worse" because those numbers depend upon cases being detected and reported.