Well this is interesting. The friendly folk regulating casinos Nevada say fantasy sports are gambling. At least for now. Anyone who has watched professional football this season has seen the ubiquitous advertising and promotion for pay-to-play daily fantasy sports sites such as DraftKings and FanDuel. On October 15th, 2015, the Nevada Gaming Control Board issued a notice in which they concluded that fantasy sports are gambling under state law. The Board ordered all unlicensed fantasy sports operators to “cease and desist” immediately, and until the requisite gaming approvals are obtained, or until applicable gaming laws are changed by the Nevada…

The NCAA bans DraftKings and daily fantasy sports provider FanDuel from their events. In a letter sent Tuesday, college sports’ largest governing body notified executives from DraftKings and FanDuel it would cancel future meetings and ban advertising from the two popular websites during NCAA championship events such as the men’s basketball tournament. Because the NCAA believes the fantasy games meet the definition of wagering, it has decided to ban all advertising, on site and on television, during championship events – a potentially big hit for two companies that have become major advertisers, particularly on television. The NCAA said its advertising…

On April 15, 2011, thousands of Americans who played online poker woke to find three popular websites shut down by the FBI and millions of dollars in players’ accounts frozen. The online poker industry survived its “Black Friday,” as the day became known, as the Obama administration declared online gaming legal later that year in states that approved it. But the aftermath should serve as a looming worst-case scenario to the millions of Americans who play daily fantasy sports, legal experts say, as many of those players who had money saved in online poker accounts had to wait years before…

Canadian online gambling operator Amaya Gaming has withdrawn its StarsDraft daily fantasy sports operation from all but four US states, citing regulatory developments. On Monday, Amaya issued a statement saying StarsDraft would restrict its real-money DFS contests to US customers located in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Kansas and Maryland, the four states Amaya says have “favorable existing daily fantasy sports guidance.” The move follows StarsDraft’s recent exits from both Florida and Nevada, which were prompted by a federal grand jury investigation and state regulators declaring that DFS operators needed gambling licenses, respectively. Amaya says the exit wouldn’t have a negative financial…

DraftKings has cleared an employee of any wrongdoing after it was alleged he used insider information to win $350,000 (€308,300) on a website operated by rival daily fantasy sports (DFS) company FanDuel. Ethan Haskell, a manager at DraftKings, released key data on fantasy teams for the NFL American football league and won the real-money prize on FanDuel in the same week. Data released by Haskell showed which NFL players were most used in teams submitted to the website’s ‘Millionaire Maker’ contests, with this data not usually released until the line-ups for games have been completed. Furthermore, having such information prior…

New Jersey’s effort to offer legalized sports betting was given new life Wednesday when a federal appeals court agreed to reconsider its decision to prohibit gambling on games. The move vacated an Aug. 25 decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia that upheld a lower-court ruling that had voided state legislation on sports gambling. The judges held then, in a 2-to-1 decision, that New Jersey’s efforts to allow casinos and racetracks to take bets violated the federal Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, or Paspa, which was passed in 1992. “We acknowledge New…

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has begun an inquiry into the practices of booming daily fantasy sports websites after players of the games and lawmakers made allegations of predatory tactics and questioned the use of insider information, according to fantasy players who said they had been contacted by investigators. The F.B.I. began contacting several prominent competitors in the contests, the players said, shortly after an employee of DraftKings, one of the two most prominent daily fantasy companies, admitted to inadvertently releasing data before lineups for the start of the third week of N.F.L. games were locked in. The employee, a…

United States Sen. Robert Menendez and Congressman Frank Pallone have asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate daily fantasy sports operators who allowed employees with access to nonpublic information to compete on rival sites. “Allowing employees of fantasy sports websites with access to nonpublic information to participate in online fantasy games, even if the games are operated by other fantasy sports companies, could give those employees an advantage akin to insider trading,” Menendez and Pallone stated in an Oct. 6 letter to the FTC. “Therefore, we also ask the FTC to investigate whether this constitutes an ‘unfair or deceptive practice’…