FantasyUp Could Go Belly Up Some Fear: Daily Fantasy Sports Site Slow Paying

A Daily Fantasy Sports site utilizing a “no rake” business model, FantasyUp, appears to be ready to pay the piper.

Seen as unsustainable over the long run unless your name happens to be CBS Sportsline, the rake-free concept is one that has crippled many an online poker site over the year.  Essentially, operators do not take in funds.  That is almost certain to be a recipe for disaster.

In recent week, some customers of FantasyUp have begun complaining of slow and no pays. 

A bizarre irony here is that Forbes.com questioned back in December if the likes of a CBS Sports would ultimately purchase startup FantasyUp.  The media conglomerate, long a viable player in full-season Fantasy Sports, just entered the DFS space this past week offering none other than rake-free. 

Dan Ziernicki invested his roughly $3.5 million won from playing at sites like FanDuel.com to develop FantasyUp.  His entire goal appeared to be developing a product that would attract an acquisition from CBS Sports or Yahoo!

“The big vision in this industry is that the players like ESPN, Yahoo! and CBS, are going to enter this space once legalities of online gambling clears up,” explained Ziernicki.  ”What we’re really focusing on is being the technological company for the future.  To be able to process large amounts of data in real time.  We are not there yet, but we are already able to handle the biggest daily fantasy sports day ever,” which Ziernicki describes has having the capacity to handle the most entries, most users and most real-time data transfers in a single day.”

CBS Sports has opted not to use the FantasyUp platform.  Whether this results in the laters’ demise remains to be seen.

The site claimed that "big news" was coming soon but that announcement came via Twitter July 23 with not a peep since. A similar message was posted to their Twitter account back in May. 

- Aaron Goldstein, Gambling911.com