Patterns of Daily Fantasy Sport Play: Tackling the Issues

Daily fantasy sports (DFS), a rapidly growing industry, allows players to create fantasy teams of real-life players and potentially win cash prizes, derived from entry fees. Some stakeholders have expressed concern that DFS's accelerated nature and other features might promote excessive play and related harm. We conducted the first descriptive summary of actual DFS play using records from a cohort of subscribers to a dominant operator, DraftKings. Participants (N = 10,385) initially entered paid National Football League (NFL) contests. Across all participants, players entered a median of two contests per entry day and typically submitted a single entry for each contest they entered. Players paid a median of $87 in entry fees throughout the 2014 NFL season and experienced an overall median net loss of $30.7. However, we identified heavily involved sub-groups of players based on number of contests entered, total entry fees, and net loss. These top 1% groups were less likely to restrict themselves to NFL games, exhibited greater time involvement, but also won a greater percentage of the contests they entered than typical players. Our observations of typical and heavily involved players tend to mirror those generated in previous Internet sports gambling research.