Twice weekly, we’ll comb through as many articles, tweets and podcasts as we can find related to the world of sports betting and daily fantasy sports, and publish the good stuff here.
Stumble upon something you think we should include? Email info@bettingtalk.com.
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The Global Gaming Expo took place in Las Vegas this week, and the American Gaming Association continued to make a big push for federal legalization of sports betting.
The American Gaming Association added to the national sports wagering debate Tuesday by releasing a new 32-page report, “The Key to Sports Integrity in the United States: Legalized, Regulated Sports Betting,” by David Forrest and Rick Parry.
“Illegal gambling leaves sports open to manipulation, allowing illicit actors to operate freely. Moreover, the lack of transparency in the black market betting leave little opportunity to deal with problems that can be linked to gambling, including problem gambling, underage gambling, crime and match fixing.
In order to bring the United States up to international standards, choke off black-market gambling and preserve and protect the integrity of sports, America should implement a sound and robust regulatory framework to legalize sports betting drawing on the experience of mature gaming markets, such as Great Britain.”
Former NBA commissioner David Stern spoke in favor of sports betting becoming legal across the country.
“Over time I’ve come to accept the notion that a properly run gambling operation … is protective, and not deleterious, to the health of sports,” Stern said.
“I guess I would say early on, I realized this idea that gambling is bad — it’s a state-regulated or Nevada-regulated industry — the notion that that’s going to lead to bad things has gotten to be anoutdated notion as we learn more about illegal gaming and the size of the market,” Stern added.
Several virtual sports betting technologies were debuted at G2E, including computer generated fights and a boat version of the Sigma Derby.
The fighters do battle in a green screen studio and the backgrounds are added after. They fight for a week straight and a computer model randomly chooses the outcome of each virtual fight wagered on.
Pretty cool virtual boat race. @News3LV#G2E2016#G2E#Gamingpic.twitter.com/FNejEUFZvI
— Sergio Avila (@SergioNews3LV) September 28, 2016
DraftKings is investigating the winner of last weekend’s Fantasy Football Millionaire contest for possibly colluding with his brother.
Fantasy Football Millionaire rules allow players to submit 150 entries. Since winning a mass-entry contest requires not only having high-scoring players, but high-scoring players that nobody else owns, having more lineups would hypothetically allow a player to increase the variance of lineups they play, therefore increasing their chances of hitting on a winning combination. The brother of papagates, DraftKings user chipotleaddict, is another high-ranking DFS player (both are ranked among RotoGrinders’ top-ten DFS players). Both are a member of the small minority of DFS players who win a majority of the prizes. The investigation appears to be about whether they colluded and pooled lineup data. This would violate the site’s collusion rules.
Pitcher Yu Darvish’s brother was convicted of gambling on baseball games by a Japanese court.
The Osaka District Court found Sho Darvish guilty of taking hundreds of bets on Major League Baseball and on professional baseball games in Japan last year.
The court said the 27-year-old younger brother of Yu Darvish was sentenced to two years and four months in prison, but it was suspended for five years. The court said the defendant’s gambling was limited to his group of friends and was not linked to organized crime, according to local media reports.
The younger Darvish took bets of 10,000 yen ($100) on Japanese and American professional baseball games, accepting wagers totaling about 110 million yen ($1.1 million) through the LINE social networking application, Kyodo News reported.
A pair of Massachusetts loan sharks were indicted for running an illegal sports betting operation.
“This illegal sports betting operation took advantage of compulsive gamblers by charging extremely high interest rates and aggressively pursuing debts in order to turn a profit,” Healey said.
An op-ed in the LA Times takes a look at political prediction markets.
You might turn to political prediction markets. A hybrid between sports betting and derivatives markets, these allow traders to buy and sell shares that will pay out if a certain political event occurs (e.g., Donald Trump wins the 2016 presidential election.) This is more flexible than a one-time bet: You might buy shares in the Republican to win the presidency at 25 cents on the dollar one month but decide to sell them for 35 cents the next, meaning that you can extract value without having to “win” any particular bet. If prediction markets were perfect, then Republican-to-win shares trading at 35 cents would straightforwardly indicate a 35% chance that a Republican would win.