How Insider Information at Daily Fantasy Sports Sites May Provide Unfair Edge
In DFS911.com’s continuing series entitled Daily Fantasy F***ed, our sister site looks at the potential unfair advantage employees have in collecting data that can assist them with winning competing website contests.
This week’s shining example occurred when a DraftKings employee inadvertently released data regarding one of the Daily Fantasy Sports site’s biggest contests – the Millionaire Maker – prior to the start of all the NFL games involved in the contest.
Turns out said employee ended up winning the $350,000 at FanDuel the week of the data leak. Say what?
Rotogrinders co-founder Cal Spears suggests the employee in question, Content Manager Ethan Haskell, did not use insider information to help win the FanDuel contest, though one can see why there has been a bit of a public uproar on social media sites such as Twitter and Spears own posting forum regarding the matter and potential for fraud to occur.
There is a narrative running on Twitter that Ethan had access to this data before lineups locked and used it to play on Fanduel. From what I’m told he received the ownership report well after lineups locked on Fanduel. There is plenty of merit in a debate about site employees playing on different sites, but we need to base that debate in reality. Ethan was not using this data to pick his week 3 teams on Fanduel, he was writing about this data for DK Playbook after his week 3 teams on Fanduel had already locked.
Read the Full Report at DFS911.com here.
- Payton O’Brien, Gambling911.com Senior Editor
