by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the February 9
showing of the American Experience show on Leopold and Loeb PBS ran a Frontline episode called “The Fantasy Sports Gamble,” which
had the same problem as the American Experience show on James Garfield: it leaped around from
topic to topic. It was based on a series of investigative articles in the New
York Times and was directed by Frank
Koughan from a script by himself and Walt Bogdanich, one of the Times reporters who also wrote the articles. The problem
was it kept flitting from the offshore gaming sites set up to avoid the 2006
law passed by Congress to outlaw online betting on real sports events — many of which are at least
formally based on Curacao (pronounced “Kura-sow,” with “sow” pronounced like
the word for a female pig), an island off the shore of Venezuela which is its
own independent country and which seems to exist as a place for banks to
incorporate if they think the Cayman Islands’ banking laws are too transparent,
to the big “fantasy sports” operations like FanDuel and Draft Nation. The
gimmick behind “fantasy sports,” and the element that gives it that name, is
that instead of betting on real teams playing real games, you’re supposed to
make up your own roster of professional players in a particular sport, then see
how your team does against other players’ fantasy teams in computer-generated competitions
based on how the actual players do in their actual games. Because the initial
selection of the players is your responsibility, and because fantasy sports
became so popular so quickly, the fantasy companies were able to get what they
do called a “game of skill” rather than a “game of chance” and therefore win
exemption from the 2006 law declaring Internet gambling illegal. However, in
order to attract more players (and especially attract players who aren’t sports nerds interested in in-depth study of real
players’ statistics to assemble their “fantasy” rosters), the fantasy outfits
have altered the rules to make it more like out-and-out gambling, from randomly
choosing your “fantasy” teams for you (the fantasy-sports equivalent of a
“quick pick” in a lottery draw) and awarding prizes daily instead of waiting
until the end of the season to declare the winners. This show suffered from the
flaw of a lot of investigative reporting: they built up a good prima facie case that something about this situation is wrong and deserves a
social response, but it’s not clear just what we’re ought to be outraged about.
Is it that fantasy sports attracts people who will develop gambling addictions
and lose scads of borrowed money they’ll have no way of paying back, thereby
wrecking their lives? Yes, but so will every other game in the world that people can make bets
on.
