Original proponent of UIGEA calls daily fantasy sports a "cauldron of daily betting"

[The Buzz]

Former Iowa Rep. Jim Leach didn't win over many fans from the iGaming industry a decade ago when he was one of the main proponents behind an Internet gambling ban in the U.S., and he's not very impressed with the unintended consequences of the UIGEA, which exempts fantasy sports and allowed the rise of daily fantasy sports operators like DraftKings and FanDuel.

"It is sheer chutzpah for a fantasy sports company to cite the law as a legal basis for existing," Leach told the Associated Press. "Quite precisely, UIGEA does not exempt fantasy sports companies from any other obligation to any other law."

Full story here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/...daily-betting/

[TheGooner]

The claim that Fantasy Sports Betting is skills based and exempt while normal Sports Betting is not exempt has NEVER made sense to me. Both forms of gambling require skills to make correct choices and profits - but any monkey can make a wrong choice.


On a different point - Fantasy Sports Betting relies on individual performances and statistics - and we are seeing in World Cricket that these factors are the easiest ones in the game to "fix" as individual players can chuck a performance. If the claimed concern is about gambling affecting games then fantasy sports has more concern than normal sports betting.

I still don't understand why Fantasy sports gets a carve out on existing legislation.

[The Buzz]

I still don't understand why Fantasy sports gets a carve out on existing legislation.

Because when the UIGEA was being debated, the NFL's lobbyists wanted to make sure that Joe Sixpack would still want to watch a meaningless Thursday Night Football game with teams he didn't care about because he was starting the Cardinals kicker on his fantasy team that week, so they made sure there was a fantasy sports exemption. They didn't envision the daily version of fantasy sports cropping up, but once they saw how lucrative it was, they wanted in on it, too.

It's not good policy, but there's a lot of bad policy that gets through because special interests get their way.