The daily fantasy sports (DFS) industry, which is projected to bring in over $14 billion in revenue by 2020, is currently embroiled in a scandal that raises a number of important questions about how the game is run.
The industry blog DFS Report reported that DraftKings employee Ethan Haskell published competitively sensitive data early on the day of DraftKing’s “Millionaire Maker,” the site’s largest tournament. DraftKings, along with its competitor FanDuel, are two of the biggest DFS carriers in the industry.
“[T]his was published in error originally by myself,” Haskell wrote in a forum post featured on DFS Report. “I’ve fixed the error and we’ll be putting checks in place to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Haskell reportedly won $350,000 on the rival site FanDuel that same week.
According to DFS Report, the data that Haskell allegedly posted concerned how popular players were on the DraftKings platform before rosters locked for the day’s games. This is competitively sensitive because in order to win big in DFS you need to select players that other people overlook.
In a recent statement given to Tech Insider, however, DraftKings said that “the employee in question” had “inadvertently” posted the data, and that after a “thorough investigation” over several days, they found “no evidence that any information was used to create an unfair advantage.”
According to industry experts, the concern isn’t in Haskell’s inadvertent publishing of data. If he didn’t have access to the data until the FanDuel rosters were locked, then he couldn’t act on it.
According Chris Grove, editor of the trade publication Legal Sports Report, the real problem is that Haskell had such easy access to data at all. The apparently lax attitude surrounding access to such sensitive data in a multi-billion dollar industry raises a number of important questions, according to Grove:
• How could a mid-level manager have access to that competitively sensitive data so readily?
• How could that data be posted in such a significant manner?
• Given the amount of employees from each site that play on other sites, shouldn’t there be some sort of restriction?
A joint statement given to Tech Insider from DraftKings, FanDuel, and the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, says that in the Fantasy Sports Trade Association charter has a requirement that employees don’t use competitive data from to play on other sites, and they haven’t found evidence that Haskell violated those rules.
Still, the statement says, “the inadvertent release of non-public data by a fantasy operator employee has sparked a conversation among fantasy sports players about the extent to which industry employees should be able participate in fantasy sports contests on competitor sites.”
The industry is working “to develop a more detailed policy,” the statement says.
In the meantime, the statement says DraftKings and Fanduel are prohibiting employees from playing fantasy sports for money.
