John Oliver set aside a large portion of his show “Last Week Tonight” on Sunday to launch an attack on daily fantasy sports. Oliver’s 20 minute segment pointed out the similarities between daily fantasy sports and professional poker, ultimately using it to support his opinion that daily fantasy sports is gambling, and should be dealt with as such:
“By any rational definition, daily fantasy is gambling, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. People clearly love it. But if we’re going to de-facto legalize sports gambling across the U.S. we should at least do it on purpose, and not because two companies have somehow weaseled out a way to pretend they’re not something that they really are.”
Some people will inevitably agree with his central point, but Oliver arrives at it awkwardly. He attempts to take aim at fantasy sports’ “game of skill” defense by pointing to the unfairness of it all. Daily fantasy sports are “effectively dominated by numbers nerds,” Oliver says, referring to the algorithm-toting professionals who are hardened in the world of professional poker.
Except railing on the unfairness of it all undermines the point he’s trying to make.
Oliver points to the statistical unlikelihood of a casual player beating one of the “numbers nerds” as evidence that the game is gambling (which, by legal definition, means it’s predominantly luck-based) when it’s in fact evidence of the opposite: If, as Oliver says, players can manipulate their odds of winning so severely over an opponent — using an algorithm or otherwise — it means it’s a by-product of a system that can be gamed. If skill didn’t dominate chance, then a majority of the money wouldn’t be able to consistently filter to Oliver’s “numbers nerds.” It wouldn’t be decided by someone’s ability to create an algorithm, it would be decided by luck.
That doesn’t mean you can’t think daily fantasy sports are unfair or predatory — as Oliver clearly does — and therefore should be subjected to certain regulations like the stock market, for example. It just means, in this case, Oliver’s argument doesn’t make sense.
