The battle between FanDuel and DraftKings to dominate the sports betting market is not a complicated story. The two startups have done essentially the same things over the past decade to stay alive, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and making deals with sports leagues ... And now, as the National Football League season begins, they’re fighting again, which is what rivals are supposed to do ... There’s a bit more to the story, of course, conveyed with vividness and reportorial precision by Albert Chen, a Sports Illustrated writer and editor, in Billion Dollar Fantasy.
This account of the rise and fall of two internet startups that became billion-dollar enterprises, FanDuel and DraftKings, details how fantasy-football gambling went from kitchen tables (buddies throwing money into a pot) to a massive operation in which players pitted their drafting expertise against others across the globe. Author Chen gets close to the individuals on both sides of the Atlantic ... Scandal intruded when one company’s employee used inside information to bet on an opponent’s site. With criminal investigations from the FBI came attempts at regulation, but the story is a long way from over. Suggest this both to fantasy-sports participants and to readers of Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires...
In this entertaining debut, Sports Illustrated editor Chen examines a decade of online fantasy sports ... Fans of financial thrillers such as Barbarians at the Gate will be excited by this insider account of the dizzying rise of fantasy sports websites.
