DraftKings is Here to Save You from Your Awful, Normal Life

Meet the Schlub.

Exceptional for being perfectly unexceptional in every way, the Schlub drifts aimlessly through a barbecue in Suburbia, USA. Ed Norton, the man who originally spawned Tyler Durden’s anarchic fury, plays Siren here, drawing the Schlub to the quest for the mythical “Sleeper.” The Schlub locks eyes with another of his kind, staring even further down the barrel of existential dread as evidenced by the bald baby anchored to his chest. An acknowledgment. This is midlife, folks. It ain’t fucking pretty.

This little slice of Americana misery has descended upon the NFL season’s opening weeks like a swarm of Egyptian locusts. An unrelenting participant in every single commercial break of every single game, DraftKings offers a pay-to-play fantasy football competition as an escape route to your meaningless life.

Pay an entry fee of your choice, enter a group with other naïve adventure seekers, and create your lineup of football gladiators. Most points takes the cash. You can play all day long. It’s that easy.

Well, no, wait. It’s actually not that easy. I mean, it’s easy, but it takes skill. And it’s legal. Remember that. It’s completely legal. Can’t you see that?

Gambling or Putting Money on Educated Predictions?

To untrained eyes, the organized monetization of fantasy sports being peddled by DraftKings and its doppleganger, FanDuel, seems suspiciously like that illegal activity we like to call “gambling.”

In fact, the companies’ media blitz has been so successful that its potential illegality caught the attention of lawmakers like New Jersey Congressman Frank Pallone and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey.

After complaining about being “inundated by commercials for fantasy sports websites,” in the Washington Post, Mr. Pallone announced that, “the legal landscape governing these activities remains murky and should be reviewed.”

Meanwhile, up in Boston, the corporate home of DraftKings, Ms. Healey acknowledged, “This is a new industry. It’s something that we’re reviewing and we’ll learn more about it.

Like every well-to-do business, DraftKings has a dedicated page on its website titled, “Why Is It Legal?” The page points to “skill-based gaming” as the reason behind its legality.

Murky Money is the Best Kind of Money

Taking the one distraction that keeps 9-to-5 lifers from introspectively assessing their existence and then mainlining adrenaline via a needle of cold hard cash is far from a new concept. Plebeians in the upper decks of the Coliseum wagered on whether the lion could rip open the bear’s entrails. Two thousand years later, Calvin Johnson sprints past hapless Chicago defenders in front of thousands of screaming fans.

The only difference here is that, aside from a few dens of vice, our country’s more puritanical underpinnings have rendered gambling illegal. DraftKings and FanDuel’s “murky” designation as a game of skill allows them to monetize sports in a unique and remarkably valuable way. Entry fees for DraftKings rose from $45 million in 2013 to $304 million in 2014, while FanDuel claims that it raked in $370.7 million in entry fees in the fourth quarter of 2014 alone.

That rapid growth has attracted the attention of some of the biggest players in the sports entertainment arena. FanDuel announced a new $275 million inflow of venture capital in June, taking its total fundraising from firms including Google Capital, Time Warner Investments, NBC Sports and Comcast Ventures to $363 million since 2009. Meanwhile, DraftKings rebounded after being left high and dry by Mickey Mouse’s cold feet and announced a $300 million round of fundraising, much of it by Fox Sports.

With new money lining their pockets, these billion-dollar companies can now constantly remind you how you, even for but one glorious moment, can do something truly meaningful.

$hark$ and Minnow$

The chances you flip your insurance sales cubicle and hit the road with your legendary high school band, Myles Standish and the Technicolor Pilgrims, are (hopefully) very slim. However, they are probably higher than the chances of you winning any kind of real money with either FanDuel or DraftKings. This is because, true to their claims, FanDuel and DraftKings are seriously monetized skill based games.

To wit, an excellent piece in Bloomberg Business featured Saahil Sud, the top fantasy sports player in the world. Having studied economics and mathematics at Amherst College, Mr. Sud created his own, custom-made predictive modeling system that gives him the data needed for his $140,000 in daily wagers.

With two million dollars banked as of September 10, Mr. Sud said the arrival of new players, as a by-product of the marketing blitz, has made things “a lot easier” for top-line players like him.

You may have won your fantasy league for three years running, but unless you built your own regression model from scratch like Mr. Sud, you most likely will not be a part of the 1.3 percent of people who makes money on DraftKings and FanDuel.

I’m talking to you, 34-year-old sales rep with two kids. This dream, clearly your only chance of happiness, has died.

I…Actually…Kinda Like Barbecues?

At the end of the day, the legal status of companies like FanDuel and DraftKings doesn’t actually matter. If the “skill based gaming” argument breaks down (potentially on the argument that counting cards is a skill, but that didn’t save Blackjack) and they’re classified as gambling, they’ll just shift to an online platform based overseas like Bovada or take up massive residency in some dingy Las Vegas hotel that pumps H2O 2.0 through its vents.

Instead, what the reality behind FanDuel and DraftKings’ marketing blitz really teaches us is that there are far worse things in life than hanging out at a barbecue with your friends and family. Like, say, compulsively lighting money on fire in a weird attempt to derive greater meaning from a leather ball crossing an arbitrary line.