Pokerati – Sports fans are wagering thousands of dollars on the performance of professional athletes each day online, and it is all perfectly legal.
Known as daily fantasy sports, the games are part of an exemption to federal law banning online gambling. In daily fantasy sports, winners aren’t determined by the outcome of a single game or the performance of a single player.
Most fantasy competitions — football or baseball — last a season, but more and more players are looking for their daily fantasy fix. Critics argue that turning fantasy sports into a daily competition edges it closer to being a game of chance that’s essentially equivalent to placing a bet at race and sports books in Las Vegas.
“I’m not going to give a legal opinion,” John Kindt, an emeritus professor of business and legal policy at the University of Illinois, said Thursday. “But what I would say is that this was not the intent of Congress when it prohibited online gambling.”
The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 regulated online gambling by prohibiting gambling businesses from knowingly accepting payments in connection with a wager. The law excluded fantasy sports and legal intrastate and inter-tribal gaming.
“Fantasy sports interests argued that this was a season-long effort and substantially a game of skill,” Kindt said in a phone interview. “That appears to have changed with daily fantasy sports.”
