DraftKings spent a lot of the 2017 NFL season experimenting with its contest format and choice.
The primary Decide’em contests had been rolled out early within the yr, and slates had been regularly tweaked and shortened throughout the positioning. Each had been efforts to both please or bankrupt prospects, relying on which facet of the argument you listened to.
There’s extra change in retailer for the playoffs.
This weekend, DraftKings is launching a brand new short-form sport sort referred to as NFL Showdown. Will probably be the positioning’s first contest based mostly on a single soccer sport.
DraftKings NFL Showdown
DraftKings’ Showdown contests are wage cap-based contests that require six-player rosters — 4 offensive gamers and two defensive gamers. Sure, defensive gamers!
For the primary time, customers will have the ability to roster particular person defenders and accrue fantasy factors based mostly on their efficiency. Similar to offensive gamers, defenders can rating factors in 15 completely different classes. Scores vary from 0.5 factors for an help to 10 factors for a security or a blocked kick.
Rosters should embody not less than one offensive participant from every workforce, however there are not any positional necessities. Customers can roster each quarterbacks from the identical sport, for instance. Or 4 broad receivers.
DraftKings VP of Video games, Mark Nerenberg, supplied his Showdown pitch to Authorized Sports activities Report:
It’s a extra distinctive, thrilling expertise with extra scoring occasions all jam packed into the one sport you’re truly watching. That goes effectively with the postseason, as a result of there’s only one sport at a time that everybody’s watching. And it’s often a fairly thrilling sport.
The format will debut this Sunday for the New Orleans Saints vs. Carolina Panthers playoff sport. The week’s massive contest is an USD8 entry with USD200,000 assured (corrected).
Showdown contests can be found to customers in all 41 states served by DraftKings.
Single-game DFS?
For workforce sportsbook, the daily fantasy sportsbook trade has just about stayed away from contests based mostly on one sport. That’s each due to logistics and presumably due to authorized ramifications.
The legal guidelines governing DFS contests in states are particular in what they do and don’t enable. The format appears to adjust to nearly each legislation that’s been handed thus far (in 18 states). Contests should not be based mostly on the efficiency of a single workforce or athlete, however state legal guidelines usually say nothing concerning the variety of video games that may be concerned in a contest. One sport appears to suffice.
That language on the state stage largely mirrors that within the Illegal Web Playing Enforcement Act, the federal legislation which offers with cost processing in iGaming. That Act does have one thing to say concerning the sport composition for fantasy contests, although:
(II) All profitable outcomes replicate the relative data and ability of the members and are decided predominantly by amassed statistical outcomes of the efficiency of people (athletes within the case of sportsbook occasions) in a number of real-world sporting or different occasions.
“A number of real-world” occasions stands proud as being problematic for this kind of format. It’s half the rationale that operators took diverging stances on NASCAR and golf contests. They’re based mostly on single occasions, however the argument is that the occasions themselves might be parsed into smaller occasions (rounds in golf, or laps in auto racing). Notably, no motion has ever come on the federal stage on this concern.
DraftKings is operating contests for these sportsbook, nonetheless. And it’s not the primary to supply single-game contests, both. The now-defunct Rivalry Video games operated solely on the single-game mannequin — doing a contest for the Tremendous Bowl — and it claimed to be in full compliance with the UIGEA.
In response to Nerenberg, DraftKings would have launched single-game contests earlier if it had seen a marketplace for them. He stated he believes the entire contests are in full compliance with state and federal legal guidelines. DraftKings indicated that regulators in New York gave the competition format the inexperienced gentle.
Do prospects need the brand new DraftKings contest?
Regardless of the complaints of a loud minority, DraftKings continues to insist that its prospects crave the brand new codecs that it’s providing. The corporate spent the primary a part of the yr upgrading its platform in order that it may provide contests in a number of codecs on the similar time.
Weekend golf contests had been the primary to utilize the brand new multi-format platform, adopted by issues like MLB Arcade and NFL Decide’em. DraftKings additionally supplied World Sequence contests this season, however even these had been two-game slates.
Nerenberg stated extra codecs (like match-play golf) is perhaps on the horizon, too. He stated that he and his workforce have a number of easy objectives in thoughts after they develop a brand new product:
“If we’re going to run them overlapping one another, we actually need them to be differentiated from one another. We wish it to be one thing new,” he stated. “The sustainable, nice video games are going to be straightforward sufficient to compete, however tough sufficient to offer an actual problem. We predict that’s what we’ve created right here.”
If DraftKings goes to begin operating single-game contests, it’s logical to anticipate an enormous Tremendous Bowl contest subsequent month, too.