Here is the piece from NYTimes with the response further below in Post #2....
Rein In Online Fantasy Sports Gambling
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD<time class="dateline" datetime="2015-10-05" style="font-size: 0.6875rem; line-height: 0.75rem; font-family: nyt-cheltenham-sh, georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); margin-left: 12px;">OCT. 5, 2015
Anybody who has watched a football game on television recently has seenads for fantasy sports websites that promise multimillion-dollar contests, cash prizes and testimonials from people who claim to have won tens of thousands of dollars. The companies behind these commercials say that their games are harmless and perfectly legal. But it is hard to believe that this is what Congress had in mind when it exempted fantasy sports from a law that effectively outlawed Internet gambling in 2006.
Fantasy sports have been around for years. For most of their existence, groups of friends played against each other over the course of several months. In fantasy sports, each player assembles a hypothetical team of athletes. Points are calculated based on how those athletes do in actual games. Now companies like FanDuel and DraftKings are encouraging people to play daily and weekly fantasy games in which they compete against dozens or hundreds of strangers on the Internet.
Players pay entry fees ranging from 25 cents to several thousand dollars to win awards that go from a few dollars to more than $1 million. The most a player can lose is the entry fee; the player whose athletes collect the most points, based on the athletes’ performance, wins the top prize. There are also lesser payoffs.
These companies have grown rapidly with the help of aggressive advertising. Last year 41 million Americans and Canadians played fantasy sports, up from 27 million in 2009, according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. Professional leagues like the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball have invested in fantasy sports companies, as have businesses like Comcast, Fox and Google. Football teams like the New England Patriots and the Jacksonville Jaguars have set up cocktail lounges in their stadiums where fans can play fantasy sports.
This boom has grown because the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, which prevented payment processors from working with gambling websites, included an exemption for fantasy sports. At the time, however, most fantasy sports were the season-long, low-stakes games friends played with each other, not the daily and weekly games that companies are marketing now.
The companies argue that their games are legal under the laws of most states because they are games of skill, not chance, and they say they don’t allow people to play in the few states where the games are illegal.
Because daily and weekly fantasy games are so new, there are very few studies on whether they are addictive and result in the social problems typically associated with gambling. One study published last year in the journal Addictive Behaviors found that college students who played fantasy sports were more likely to have gambling-related problems than other students.
What is worrisome is that some lawmakers, like Representative Frank Pallone Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, are using the growth of fantasy sports to push Congress to let states legalize conventional gambling in sports. Late last year, the commissioner of the N.B.A., Adam Silver, called for legalizing sports betting.
The allure of profits from gambling clouds otherwise rational minds. Giving people more ways to bet on the outcomes of sports is sure to threaten the integrity of sports and create more gambling addicts, especially among young people who are already more likely to engage in risky behaviors.
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Rein In Online Fantasy Sports Gambling
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD<time class="dateline" datetime="2015-10-05" style="font-size: 0.6875rem; line-height: 0.75rem; font-family: nyt-cheltenham-sh, georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); margin-left: 12px;">OCT. 5, 2015
Anybody who has watched a football game on television recently has seenads for fantasy sports websites that promise multimillion-dollar contests, cash prizes and testimonials from people who claim to have won tens of thousands of dollars. The companies behind these commercials say that their games are harmless and perfectly legal. But it is hard to believe that this is what Congress had in mind when it exempted fantasy sports from a law that effectively outlawed Internet gambling in 2006.
Fantasy sports have been around for years. For most of their existence, groups of friends played against each other over the course of several months. In fantasy sports, each player assembles a hypothetical team of athletes. Points are calculated based on how those athletes do in actual games. Now companies like FanDuel and DraftKings are encouraging people to play daily and weekly fantasy games in which they compete against dozens or hundreds of strangers on the Internet.
Players pay entry fees ranging from 25 cents to several thousand dollars to win awards that go from a few dollars to more than $1 million. The most a player can lose is the entry fee; the player whose athletes collect the most points, based on the athletes’ performance, wins the top prize. There are also lesser payoffs.
These companies have grown rapidly with the help of aggressive advertising. Last year 41 million Americans and Canadians played fantasy sports, up from 27 million in 2009, according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. Professional leagues like the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball have invested in fantasy sports companies, as have businesses like Comcast, Fox and Google. Football teams like the New England Patriots and the Jacksonville Jaguars have set up cocktail lounges in their stadiums where fans can play fantasy sports.
This boom has grown because the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, which prevented payment processors from working with gambling websites, included an exemption for fantasy sports. At the time, however, most fantasy sports were the season-long, low-stakes games friends played with each other, not the daily and weekly games that companies are marketing now.
The companies argue that their games are legal under the laws of most states because they are games of skill, not chance, and they say they don’t allow people to play in the few states where the games are illegal.
Because daily and weekly fantasy games are so new, there are very few studies on whether they are addictive and result in the social problems typically associated with gambling. One study published last year in the journal Addictive Behaviors found that college students who played fantasy sports were more likely to have gambling-related problems than other students.
What is worrisome is that some lawmakers, like Representative Frank Pallone Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, are using the growth of fantasy sports to push Congress to let states legalize conventional gambling in sports. Late last year, the commissioner of the N.B.A., Adam Silver, called for legalizing sports betting.
The allure of profits from gambling clouds otherwise rational minds. Giving people more ways to bet on the outcomes of sports is sure to threaten the integrity of sports and create more gambling addicts, especially among young people who are already more likely to engage in risky behaviors.
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