Most of us do it. Almost all of us know what it is. And we all at least know someone who does it. Fantasy sports has turned into a growing billion dollar industry. You can see ads in the subway or on TV or even on your phone. It has exploded within the last couple of years. It has gone from people handwriting down players and stats and using calculators to figure out scores; into partnering up with giants like ESPN and NBC. The fantasy sports world has never been hotter. So hot in fact that it now has its own huge scandal on their hands. News recently broke about a potential game changing scandal brewing within the two biggest names in daily fantasy; Draftkings and Fanduel. It has come out that employees from both companies have allegedly been using internal company data to figure out which players people on the site have been using the most and then in turn using that information to strategically pick their own players on the opposing website; essentially insider trading. Fantasy sports are for nerds right? How much money we talking here? Well one employee in particular has recently won $300,000 in one of their weekly NFL tournaments; that kind of money.

What’s the big deal you ask? Or how is that insider trading exactly? Well let me start by explaining how these websites work. The traditional way fantasy sports work is that a group of people form a fantasy league and then choose a bunch of players, essentially forming their own teams. They then play each other each week and the winner is determined by how many points your team accumulates in that week. The way points are counted depending on the sport and your individual league. For a football league a touchdown can be worth six points and ten rushing yards can equal to one point. For a basketball league a two point field goal could equal one point and a rebound could be worth two points. I don’t want to get bogged down on the specifics of fantasy scoring but what I do want to do is make the distinction between traditional fantasy sports and daily fantasy sports very clear.

In traditional fantasy sports leagues, your made up team stays the same for the entirety of your season. That means if your players get season ending injuries or they underperform or your just flat out sucks that’s too bad. You are pretty much stuck with that team. Draftkings and Fanduel are the leaders in daily fantasy sports. In daily fantasy you pick the same kind of team but only for that week. If your team sucks or you want to switch players up, you can pick brand new players for the following week or for another contest. You can enter ten contests and have completely different players on each one. Or you can enter the same exact team ten times. In daily fantasy everyone can pick whoever they want. And that’s the beauty of daily fantasy. Your season starts over fresh every week. And because you’re not limited by anything except an imaginary salary cap you can pretty much assemble a dream team each time. It can be a little more complicated and I’m sure people that play in Draftkings and Fanduel have strategies and maybe even probability formulas they use to assemble their teams. All I wanted to do was lay down the basics so that you can truly understand what the scandal actually is.

So now, hopefully, you can better understand why this is a huge scandal and how it is actually a scandal. Draftking and Fanduel employees used information only available to them about who people were picking in these tournaments and then they would pick their teams/players. So in simpler terms, if they see ninety percent of Draftking or Fanduel users are picking Tom Brady they might instead pick Aaron Rodgers. Or even more diabolically, they can theoretically pick two teams; one with Tom Brady and then one with Aaron Rodgers. So that if Tom Brady does go off or plays better than Rodgers, they have both bases covered. If everyone picks Tom Brady and does well, that doesn’t benefit anyone since they all have him. But if Tom Brady throws for three touchdowns and Aaron Rodgers throws for four touchdowns then you can see how this would be a huge advantage. And this goes for every position not just one. So these employees have a crazy upper hand over the everyday player. Now this doesn’t guarantee victory, because the players still have to actually perform but this greatly increases the employee’s chances of winning over the everyday person who doesn’t have this inside info. I like to compare it to counting cards in Blackjack. Counting cards didn’t guarantee a winning hand, but what it did guarantee was a higher probability of winning. And after a while the casinos caught on and realized they had to change things because people that could count cards well were cleaning them out. So now they change dealers and use a multiple changing deck; making it impossible to count cards.

Draftkings and Fanduels tag lines are that it’s easy and that anyone can win. All you need is a dollar and you can win thousands even a million dollars. Well like most things in this world the little guy never catches a break. It’s never that easy. Big companies always seem to let greed dictate their actions. And don’t get it twisted, these are big companies now. Millions of dollars in prize money are exchanged every week during the NFL season. An imaginary pastime has pretty much turned the NFL into the most profitable sport in America. Fantasy football is what created this monstrous wealth for the NFL. Where they once shunned fantasy sports they have now gone all in. They show commercials on their network and promote fantasy football all over the place. With all this money involved you might not really hear about this scandal. I’m sure they want to sweep this under the rug. And for the most part people are not going to stop playing daily fantasy or fantasy sports in general. They are addicted, and so am I. There is talk that the government might step in now and enforce stricter regulation on daily fantasy websites. While others say, “it’s not a big deal, who cares?” “I’ve won some money on there, it can’t be fixed.” I like to think of it like like playing slot machines; they have them set up in such a way that it is practically impossible to win. But every once in a while you’ll see an old lady yell surrounded by flashing lights and security and you think to yourself, “one more dollar.” So we all keep playing thinking that maybe it’s our lucky day too. Well I no longer play daily fantasy sports. I can’t trust them anymore. And neither should you.