DraftKings Employee Ethan Haskell Caught Cheating

[DRK Star]

Mac Bizzo • 2 hours ago
I have an advanced perspective on the fantasy problems we all face. I worked with the site Draftstreet, before both draftkings and fanduel. There is much more the media needs to know that has not been explained or exposed.

I would like to contact someone in the industry and share a large amount of information on this topic including; an over view of the hidden problem or "darkside" of fantasy sports sites, the secret behind promo codes and how the deposits are channeled, which regulations need to be in place and why, and why eFantasy Sports should not be allowed as legal in any format.

Contact me here

macbizzo - {at} - yahoo



Paging Col. Nigel Fabersham

[Shizzmoney]

NY AG sends letter to both companies with requests for information by Oct 15

http://t.co/dGMhVPg4wC

[RealTalk]

this is why we cant have nice things

[Brittney Griner's Clit]

This shit made the nightly news tonight.

They are going to go from 33 percent of all adds on TV to 66 percent to combat this. Fuck my life.

[Daly]

I heard they are pulling ads to get out of the spotlight for a little bit.

[Shizzmoney]

Avg employee has won ~$30,000 playing FanDuel.

[Brittney Griner's Clit]

I heard they are pulling ads to get out of the spotlight for a little bit.

Thank the good lord. I'd rather watch tampon commercials.

What they really need to do is bring back the medic alert bracelet with the bitch on the floor.

Or the one with the hoveround on the edge of the Grand canyon. I always pictured that mother fucker malfunctioning or an old getting close and pushing wrong button.

[Daly]

I heard they are pulling ads to get out of the spotlight for a little bit.

Thank the good lord. I'd rather watch tampon commercials.

What they really need to do is bring back the medic alert bracelet with the bitch on the floor.

Or the one with the hoveround on the edge of the Grand canyon. I always pictured that mother fucker malfunctioning or an old getting close and pushing wrong button.

Well one way to put it is they are pulling ads to get out of the spotlight.

Another way to look at it is they are pulling ads and if the media outlets want that good tasting ad money back they better put together some favorable reporting on this story.

[ThreeBet]

Avg employee has won ~$30,000 playing FanDuel.

Pretty misleading as that is gross amount and not net. Imagine if you were playing tons of heads up matches. You would "win" tens of thousands of dollars really quick. Need net numbers to make any real conclusions.

[Shizzmoney]

This isn't encouraging:

1. VIP DraftKings Event - in July, I was invited to a VIP event August 8. Here is a link to the invite Dk rented out an incredible box at the nats game and invited a lot of big action players. Everyone was awesome but during my introduction to their Head of VIP Services* who I won't out by name here, we began discussing general game theory and it came out I had faded Strasburg who was returning from the DL. Said VIP rep thought that was a gutsy play and checked his phone saying Strasburg was "pretty chalk" in tourney play that night. This was a few minutes before 7:05 and given that I hadn't told him what contests I was playing in, broadly applied to ownership across the board. If that wasn't sketchy enough, said rep mentioned casually how he and many others play on fanduels and other dfs sites. At that point, I went back to my seat feeling like a total moron and realizing that it was pretty obvious that with insider information and "VIP" connections to top players in a loosely regulated forum, guys like me were f'ed in the long run.
2. Rick Sawyer - For the month of July, I was challenged 5 or more times a day everyday by a mysterious player named Rick Sawyer who I had never played on Fanduel, where I had a very very small and spread out sample size. He'd challenge me to baseball matches every day heads up and eventually I had to create a flow in g-mail to mark his emails as auto-read as they became so spammy. When I googled Rick Sawyer to my surprise, I was led to a "business planning manager" from DRAFTKINGS. That's right, folks... a guy on the inside at DraftKings was pegging my play on their channel as sub-optimal (or even worse, viewing my lineups and assuming he could stack against them on FD) and hunting me on a competitor site when I didn't even play heads up much or have a meaningful bankroll. I eventually emailed my VIP manager at DraftKings when I put two and two together and the shit stopped.

*The Head of VIP services is Jon Aguiar, FWIW.

The OP of that post said Kalish got back to him:

Just spoke to Matt Kalish, co founder of DK
Maintains that employees can't see internal information prior to games starting. Thinks that employee, who plays on fanduel, might have looked at rostered %. Only way this works is if there were afternoon games that day (I think there were). I still don't have an explanation for why he would have said he shouldn't have looked at that in front of me though.
Looking into the direct issue of an internal player attempting to repeatedly snipe me and agreed that it sounded uncalled for and not in good faith.

[sonatine]

*The Head of VIP services is Jon Aguiar, FWIW.

wow...

[TheXFactor]

DraftKings and FanDuel are right...it's EASY!!!

Just choose your league, pick your teams and pick up your money.
It's even easier if your an employee with access to every players info, just look up everyone's picks first before the games begin.

[Shizzmoney]

Good stuff from Bob here on the duopoly in DFS

DK also got rid of their "DK Pros" section

https://www.draftkings.com/dkpros

[yaahello]

This isn't encouraging:



*The Head of VIP services is Jon Aguiar, FWIW.

The OP of that post said Kalish got back to him:

Just spoke to Matt Kalish, co founder of DK
Maintains that employees can't see internal information prior to games starting. Thinks that employee, who plays on fanduel, might have looked at rostered %. Only way this works is if there were afternoon games that day (I think there were). I still don't have an explanation for why he would have said he shouldn't have looked at that in front of me though.
Looking into the direct issue of an internal player attempting to repeatedly snipe me and agreed that it sounded uncalled for and not in good faith.

isnt this the guy druff said was a younger version of himself?

[chinamaniac]

Avg employee has won ~$30,000 playing FanDuel.

These numbers are dumb because some of these guys are putting in thousands of entries PER DAY. The fact they have been paid out x does not include their entry fees I would assume

[RealTalk]

draftkings response:

[Dan Druff]

garrett covered it pretty well.

When you are playing in these big tournies, it's different than playing in normal 12-person fantasy sports leagues where no player can be owned by two people.

In fantasy tournaments, it's the best combination of players that wins, as opposed to your players versus other people's unique players that don't intersect with yours.

So if you own player John Smith, no matter how well John does that day, you will not gain on anyone else who also owns John Smith. Your gains take place against the people who DON'T own him.

So by seeing the percentages of player ownership, you can pick the guys who are under-selected -- ones likely to perform, yet not owned by many people. So if these guys DO perform, you clean up.

Ethan Haskell and others used insider data on ownership at DraftKings, and assumed it would be similar at FanDuel (which it was).

This trick worked because both sites are so huge that the variance of ownership choices is likely to smooth out, and the stats in similar contests on both sites are likely to be pretty close.

[Dan Druff]

Kinda disappointed that Jon Aguiar might be semi-caught-up in this, but whatever.

I was impressed with his forum/Twitter activism against shady online poker sites, as well as his willingness to speak out against Caesars fail at the WSOP. So that's where I liked the guy. But I don't really know him well.

This is honestly a pretty bad scandal, though not at all surprising. I explained it over at the Scams, Scandals, and Shadiness forum, though garrett (yes, THAT garrett) actually did a good job of explaining it before I did. Not kidding.

Having access to data on a DFS site is HUGE in a large tournament, because you can load up on players that were under-selected versus their actual value, and then gain huge on your opponents when these players produce.

Because of the huge number of players on sites like DraftKings and FanDuel, it smooths out the "drafting variance" and produces similar numbers on both sites, so data from DraftKings is useful for the same tournament on FanDuel, and vice-versa.

Obviously these spectacular results that DraftKings employees had on FanDuel was not a coincidence.

Unfortunately it shines a light on something long (but somewhat quietly) feared about DFS sites: Without regulation, they can and will be easily abused.

This is even more true with DFS than poker, because practices like this are not easily provable as outright cheating (as looking at hole cards would be), but definitely give a huge edge to those with access to such data.

These sites need to operate under a strict set of rules and regulations, with stiff penalties (financial and criminal) for deviating from them, just as exists in brick-and-mortar casinos in Nevada and AC.

Self-regulation does not and will not ever work in industries where large sums of money routinely change hands.

We learned this time and time again in online poker, and we are re-learning it now with DFS.

Of course, regulation must be done properly. So far it has been a mess with online poker, but that's because it was hastily thrown together and the regulations were written by idiots who didn't understand online poker properly.

Anyway, I think some changes will be coming soon.

DFS is already very misleading for the average Joe, as he is led to believe that he's playing something equivalent to a shorter term version of the yearly fantasy sports leagues he plays with his friends, when in reality the average person has very little chance to win in the medium-term, let alone the long term.

At least in poker, most people are aware that a significant skill element exists, and that they aren't all that likely to be better than the pros when they first sit down and play.

[BeerAndPoker]

Avg employee has won ~$30,000 playing FanDuel.

These numbers are dumb because some of these guys are putting in thousands of entries PER DAY. The fact they have been paid out x does not include their entry fees I would assume

Not only are the numbers dumb but 0.3% could actually be a lot more money then you think. If Draft Kings has 30 workers that play on Fan Duel then those 30 people taking 0.3% of pools made up by a couple million people then those 30 people winning 0.3% or 3/1000th of the money is actually a decent amount for as many people are playing.

Without knowing the exact number breakdown it's difficult to make anything out of this except the example might try to make people think 0.3% is nothing when it could be significant.

[BeerAndPoker]

Some of these guys fire 100 entries in the large fields so with the percentages information and other program data they probably can use it's a guarantee they will see a positive ROI over time. The edge is just too big.

If a $25 entry can net you $500k+ for first with a bunch of other big scores in terms of ROI that are paid out then firing $25x 100 entries ($2500) in these fields should net you some of these big scores over time but even in bad weeks you most likely don't lose much if you aren't returning at least a small profit using this insider info.