Maybe my longest post, but hear me out. (skip to 2nd paragraph if you don't care about the back story)
Myself and a group of close friends have been playing daily fantasy sports since mid 2013 (and fantasy sports for around 10yrs) on the major sites. Maybe it's luck and we're all running above mean expectations, but we have all been winners. The majority of our play has been 50/50s and 3 man winner take all, but some of us have had success in the large GPPs too. Almost all of us simply play football, however a few of us do dable in other sports (I myself admittedly will say I am a losing nba player but whatever). On Draftings, 2013 was a good year for us, 2014 was our biggest year (I myself had over 110% ROI with very minimal GPP success) and 2015, has been very good for us as well... for the most part. We have noticed a trend that while we may be winning on DK, on fanduel we have had very little success if any at all. At first we believed it was variance, then we thought it could be the kicker component is just to much of a wild card (I actually proved using a standard historical regression using price/usage of a kicker would have a below avg return point wise based on the kicker pricing, however not enough to cause us to do as poorly as we have done), then maybe we thought the .5 difference of PPR and pricing model drove this, lastly this cheating scandal insider trading scandal came out. We just had no fucking clue.
We continued to play up until early Oct and then we all decided it was bullshit and stopped. Fair enough, the scandal was blowing up and we just stuck to DK and a bunch of smaller sites (starsdraft RIP, we all cleaned up there). Recently in early NOV my friend decided to start the process of charging back the charges. Now at first the group thought this was slightly scummy, but he made a really good point here... How is it that we are able to do so well on other sites, but for whatever reason on this site we continue to lose. My friend is one of the highest winner players in our group and the more he talked about it the more it started to make sense... why was this happening, it can't just be luck after 2.5yrs, are the players just better on fanduel, was the rake to high (same as DK btw)? We just didn't know.
As a bit of an aside, I got everyone onto the Citi 2% cash back card so we were all just bonus whoring the crap out of it for months at end... Basically deposit $1-3k a week and when we won (this season myself I had 15 positive weeks some very small some very large) most fantasy sites will pay your credit card first. Do this over multiple sites on a weekly basis and in a month you can cycle (very)low 6 figures and earn 2% on that. Keep in my this only works if you're winning, if you are losing... you are just losing 2% less.
Eventually we all came around to his side and waited for the results of the dispute. First he tried to start a dispute on paypal, interestingly enough the way the process takes place is that if you pay with a credit card and don't use paypal balance then paypal can not actually dispute these charges given how the process is set up with fanduel (this is not the case in most of the time) and you must go through the credit card company. Fine, my friend filed a charge back on his card for around ~9k, the card company sent him papers requesting a write up and all pertinent information. My friend filled out all the information, printed out news articles, court files and mailed it in. After about a month of waiting (during which time the card company actually gave him the credit on his account for the 9k, which was lol because he had a negative balance on his card for a few weeks), he got a letter in the mail saying that the charge back was complete and the 9k could no longer be credited back to his card, were previously had the charge back not been ruled in his favor they could have put the 9k back.
So now that this actually happened... what would you do in our shoes? You can prove you are a winning player, most likely in the top 50% of winning players over the last 3 years, so this isn't sour grapes about us being losing players, but rather for some odd reason you can not win on this particular place. You have put in thousands and now know that if you put in this charge back, it will most likely be ruled in your favor. Would you do it? Is it unethical to do it and recover your money? Is it worth not being able to ever play on fanduel again?(his account was suspended and received a life time ban with no chance of review according to the email he received)
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Originally Posted by Hockey Guy
