According to a new study done by a state university professor in Kansas, daily fantasy sports should not be classified as a game of chance or gambling. The new paper will soon be published in the Journal of Sports Science, and it urges state legislators not to classify daily fantasy sports as gambling.
A study by a Kansas State University professor has stated that daily fantasy sports shouldn’t be classified as gambling. This is because they are games of skill, not chance, according to the study.
Daily Fantasy Sports Not Games of Chance
Allowing residents to participate in daily fantasy sports can have a big impact on a state’s economy, as well as other societal impacts, says the report. The new paper also states that daily fantasy sports are not games of chance, but rather skill. The paper states that unskilled players will never win when engaging in DFS, while skilled players will win far more often.
The authors of the paper reached their conclusions thanks to simulating an unskilled player. In the simulations, the program generated teams randomly, as a new player might do. The simulation lost every single one of the 35 contests. The odds of losing all 35 contests is less likely than flipping a coin and getting 28 heads in a row. It is also 300 times less likely than getting struck by lightning.
Skill Plays Big Part in Daily Fantasy Sports
After the simulation was programmed to act like an unskilled player, it was then programmed to use an integer programming model, simulating how a skilled player may go about choosing a team. The skilled simulation outperformed the unskilled simulation every time. The authors go on to state that in a game of chance, all strategies should perform equally well and a team chosen at random would perform as well as a team chosen using a special strategy.
The authors of the paper are hoping that the results will help guide state lawmakers to stop classifying daily fantasy sports as gambling. It will be interesting to see if the paper has any impact on states that don’t allow DFS.
