Dueling with kings, p.1
Dueling with Kings, page 1
Thank you for downloading this Touchstone eBook.
* * *
Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Touchstone and Simon & Schuster.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP
or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com
For my dad, who would have found all of this funny
PROLOGUE
The bass thumps so deeply that I can hardly hear Rob Gomes as he pours his heart out.
“They think I can’t be a pro,” he spits, rattling off the players who won him a million dollars. “I know the game, bro: Jonas Gray? Point-six percent owned. The Bucs D? That was because I know the game. I’ve played it all my life.”
It’s the day before the biggest day in the history of Daily Fantasy Sports—NFL kickoff, week one, 2015—and Gomes and I are standing by the pool, close enough that I’m getting splashed by the couples drunkenly staging chicken fights in the water. All around us, scenes straight out of MTV’s old spring break specials are under way. This is Miami, after all, and at the posh Fontainebleau Hotel, pretty much anything goes.
Drinks are flowing, girls in barely there bikinis are gyrating, and chiseled guys with haircuts lifted from pro soccer stars are backflipping into the water to attract attention. Gomes, whose Twitter handle is “Big BoOTy Bob,” fits right in with this crowd—hell, he owns it—but right now, he’s only feeling what he lacks: the respect of the professional DFS players.
If you turned on a television set anytime in August or September of 2015, you’d recognize Rob Gomes. With his brother, Dave, he was one of the first men to win a million dollars playing Daily Fantasy Sports, carting away one of those giant cardboard checks for winning DraftKings’ Fantasy Football Millionaire Maker competition in the fall of 2014. Their success was immortalized in a DraftKings commercial that aired over and over and over as the company sought to promote its brand.
Gomes answers all the obvious questions before they are even asked, with the practiced staccato of someone who has walked this conversational road before. Yes, his antics in the commercial are real—“That’s not faked. That’s raw emotion, bro. You can’t fake that”—yes, the commercials get him recognized—“That’s why I got the man-bun, so I can be incognito”—and yes, the commercials get him girls. “We won a million bucks, you know?” Gomes shrugs.
The Gomes brothers are something of a phenomenon at this pool party. For a pair of nobodies straight out of the Boston seen in Ben Affleck movies, this seems like the life. They’re rich, they have women, they have D-list celebrity fame. DraftKings even chartered a private jet to fly the Gomes boys, some pals, a gaggle of pros, and a few lucky regular guys here to Miami for this celebration, a two-day blowout party to kick off the football season. The drinks flowed immediately, and the Gomes brothers camped out by the pool to work on their lineups and gaze at the ladies, soon settling in with a bachelorette party. They have achieved every bro’s dream.
Yet Rob Gomes is restless. He wants what he doesn’t have: to become a pro, to make a full-time life out of DFS.
Watching all this unfold, I can understand the feeling. I’m two months into my quest to join the ranks of Daily Fantasy’s best players, known as “sharks,” and so far, it’s looking bleak. It seems like a blast to be one of the big names here, drinking and gawking, on the brink of a potential $2 million check—the top offering in the weekend’s main $10 million tournament, the largest prize pool in the nascent industry’s history. But right now I’m just another money-losing fish, and that doesn’t look like it’s going to change anytime soon.
Behind us, a DraftKings employee urges the pool partiers to be extra-raucous, making for better background scenes for the television show filming out on the pool deck. On the show, a crew of DFS experts are unveiling their top picks for the weekend, offering last-minute advice to legions waiting on the Internet for any money-winning wisdom. Usually, these shows are filmed in studios. All this flesh and frolic makes for a decidedly better backdrop.
“CAN-NON-BALL!” one heavily tattooed dude shouts, and it takes me a little too long to realize what that means. The plunging bro soaks my shorts and shirt, and I need to dry off. I head inside to DraftKings’ watch room, the ballroom set up for viewing the weekend’s football games. Once the games kick off on Sunday, the room is packed with hundreds of DFS players, nearly all male, sitting in groups on white couches, glancing from the massive screens back to their computers as their scores mount. If they get bored watching the games themselves, there’s beer pong tables, video games, and free stuff arrayed as far as the eye can see, from high-end food and liquor to giveaways of DraftKings swag.
This is no Man Cave. It’s a Man Cavern.
This entire September weekend is a coming-out party for DraftKings, the newer of the two Daily Fantasy giants. They spent years chasing FanDuel, the original DFS megasite, which controlled more than 80 percent of the market less than a year ago. Now the bitter rivals are neck and neck in size. Smelling blood, DraftKings waged a massive advertising campaign to push ahead—becoming the nation’s top advertiser in early September—and the commercials blare constantly all around us on the huge, thirty-foot screens, promising big wins and massive payouts.
To pull off this ad blitz, they’ve spent lavishly, like someone had turned on a spigot of cash and no one believed the dollar bills would ever stop pouring out. DraftKings spent $24 million on TV commercials in the first week of September, putting them ahead of brands like Coca-Cola and Budweiser. That spend-first, worry-later ethos trickled down to this multiday party. There’s so much money flying around that even the sharks don’t seem to know what to do with it. So they do what comes naturally: they bet.
One picks up a football, and they start wagering—at $100 per toss—on whether they can throw it through a target. After a few throws, one says he owes the other $400. I can’t tell if they actually plan on collecting, but they ask me if I want in on the action.
“No thanks, I messed up my shoulder in college,” I say, a quarter-truth that hides the fact that $100 a throw is far, far too rich for my blood. Casual betting is everywhere. There are bets on who can run a faster forty-yard dash on the grass outside the hotel, bets on shooting a basketball, side bets on the NFL games themselves. Outside on the patio, a giant variant of beer pong has been erected, using basketballs and trash cans instead of Ping-Pong balls and cups. Two guys have been dominating all weekend, starting at $20 a game and then playing for increasingly higher stakes. Word is they’ve made $2,500.
Out by the pool, I’d met a lively, eccentric pro who goes by the username BeepImaJeep—“Beep” to all. He’d flown in on the private jet with all the other big wheels, and the Canadian is soaking up the Florida sun with aplomb. A math and game theory savant, this buoyant, high-energy twentysomething represents the flip side of the Rob Gomes part of DFS—the wonky brain to Gomes’s tanned bro.
He’s been guiding me around for much of the weekend, and as we stroll the watch room, Beep introduces me to another big-time player, a shark who goes by the name PetrGibbons. PetrGibbons, real name Matt Boccio, is a name I’d seen on the top-ten leaderboard for the day’s main contest, the so-called Millionaire Maker. He entered 498 lineups in that contest, and the best of them has a real shot to win the $2 million first prize—but at the moment, he’s bummed, because his receiver, Dez Bryant, has just gotten hurt.
“I’m in sixth in the ‘milly maker’ right now, but I have Dez, and he just got injured,” he says.
We look at the screen as replays show the Cowboys star coming out of the game. It probably takes Boccio out of the running for first, though even holding sixth place would be worth $100,000.
He’s having a good day regardless of what happens in the milly maker, turning his screen toward me to show that he has lineups all over the top ten of several other major contests, winning thousands upon thousands. Before he moves it away, I steal a glance at his account balance, there at the top of his screen. It’s $143,000 and change, not including anything he’d wagered or might be winning today. As we walk away, I ask Beep if he’s a full-time pro.
“Oh, no, he works for FanDuel,” Beep says, as if working for the competition and yet being here to bet and win big on DraftKings is the most normal thing in the world. The relationship between the two companies—and their employees—continues to mystify me. Players are employees of one, and huge sharks on the other? There’s no love lost between the two Daily Fantasy giants, and everyone knows it; for a time, early on in the day, whenever a FanDuel commercial came on the screens and played on the speakers, an awkward silence came over the room. But there were simply so many, drowned out by even more DraftKings commercials, that they all soon faded into so much background noise. I wonder if the companies could possibly be getting their money’s worth out of it all.
The thought is lost as the room erupts around us, men leaping out of their seats, standing on couches, cheering. On every one of the enormous screens ringing the ballroom, I see Cowboys tight end Jason Witten celebrating a touchdown catch from his quarterback, Tony Romo. With both players picked by about 10 percent of fantasy teams, enough people have paired up that combo that the touchdown moves the needle. Money is flowing, changing hands, shifting electronically from one player to another, and the feeling in the room is electric. My lineups for the weekend are long dead, but it doesn’t matter. Even though it gets me nothing, I can’t help but follow the progress of DFS players I know, sweating” it with them, as it’s called.
Yet surprisingly few of the pros and high-level regulars are actually winning anything; on this day, the smart money is bombing hard, while unknown randoms are sucking up the cash. Beep is losing big this weekend, down $30,000 as the games unfold, but it doesn’t seem to bother him, despite squandering more that day than I’d made in a year around his age.
Why would he care? He can make it back next week. There is so much money to be made, so many new players flooding the contests, that for the best of the best—those with a true edge—a big win is always just a week away. Over the three-week period from the end of August through that Sunday in Miami, DraftKings added 1.5 million new users, growing to 4.5 million accounts. These new arrivals would make a median deposit of $25. Most of them would lose it.
And most of the winnings would go to these few, the ones making television appearances, gorging themselves on the free spreads, and partying at the pool, everyone so certain it will only keep going up, up, up. The party at the Fontainebleau makes me think of stock traders in the 1980s before the market tanked—so much testosterone, so much abandon, so much certainty that the party will never stop—and more than anything, so much money.
The numbers change like magic, millions moving this way and that in an instant. It feels like none of these winnings, these losses, are even real. The cartoonish figures piling up, the people who might be losing it—hell, even this party, with its giant screens and white couches and shrimp and booze. Except it is real, all of it. Everyone here is on a high, so certain they’ve latched on to the next big thing, something that can’t be stopped, something that’s going to change sports as we know it.
But the thing about a high is, eventually, you have to come down.
01
FOUR MONTHS EARLIER . . .
Baseball is so boring.
It’s deep in the seventh inning of yet another Yankees–Red Sox game at Fenway Park, and I’m crammed into my seat in the century-old press box high above the field, doing anything but watching tonight’s game.
My reporter’s notebook lies open in front of me, so I turn to a clean sheet and start doing a little math. I’m trying to calculate how many games I’ve covered over the seven years I’ve been paid to write about baseball, at two different newspapers. Seven years, multiplied by about 140 regular season games, plus about 25 spring training and 15 postseason games annually. That comes out to . . . around 1,260 games, give or take a few dozen. That’s a lot of baseball.
After so many four-hour Yanks-Sox slogs, I’ve started to lose my love for it all. That wonder that drives fans to the park, that excitement I’d felt about baseball as a kid, before this was my job? It’s gone. Fenway is no longer a lyric little bandbox to me—it’s become a cage, one of thirty spread across the country. Call me spoiled. You’d be right. I can’t help it.
The final pitch is thrown, the last out is made. I fire off an email containing my initial game story to my bosses at the Wall Street Journal and join the other Yankee beat writers in our daily ritual of sprinting down to the clubhouses to interview players and managers.
We fight our way through the mass of humanity clogging the Fenway concourse, then crowd into Yankee manager Joe Girardi’s tiny office in the ancient, musty visitors’ clubhouse, dank from one hundred years of champagne celebrations, sewage overflows, and sweaty uniforms. After we finish our interview and file out, I run into John Tomase, a former Boston Herald sportswriter and now radio reporter and host in the Boston area. In his early forties, chunky, with a big mop of curly hair, the fellow Tufts University grad is one of the brightest, and snarkiest, reporters in the Boston press corps, and the perfect guy for me to complain to. I break down my press box math for him, laying it on thick as I bitch about my so-called dream job.
“I’ve lost my taste for it. I honestly can’t remember the last time I actually watched the whole game,” I whine, expecting to be rewarded with the usual fraternal sympathy of another cranky scribe.
“I watched every pitch,” he tells me instead, matter-of-factly. “I had half the Yankee lineup. Those guys just won me four hundred bucks.”
Huh?
“You were betting on the game?” I ask. “Like, with a bookie?” That would be a big no-no in the baseball writer’s world.
“A bookie? I wouldn’t know where to find a bookie. It’s Daily Fantasy Sports—on FanDuel. It’s a website. You pick the players, build a lineup, and the better they do, the better you do,” Tomase says.
“I do it at every game I cover now,” he adds. Then he beats me to my next question before I can ask it. “It’s totally legal.”
Remember in old cartoons, when Donald Duck or Bugs Bunny would hear about some unbeatable moneymaking opportunity? Their eyes would roll up in their heads and turn into dollar signs, spinning like the wheels of a casino slot machine. I have to imagine that’s what mine are doing as Tomase explains how he picks players for his lineups and then watches it all unfold.
“And you made how much?” I ask again.
Four hundred dollars. And that’s nothing. He’s soon telling me stories about friends who had won $10,000, $15,000, all on quick bets on the games I’m there watching every day. All of it perfectly legal, all of it at the click of a button.
To me, this sounds like old-fashioned sports betting, conjuring up images of bent-over, graying men hidden in smoky back rooms, taking calls and setting money lines—the Pittsburgh Pirates as 2–1 favorites, the Detroit Tigers as 6–1 underdogs. Oh, and the big meatheads standing behind them who break your knees when you don’t pay up.
No, he explains again. This isn’t sports betting. It’s fantasy baseball.
I’d played fantasy sports—where you choose players from across the league to create a baseball or football team, competing against similar teams fielded by your friends—for years, enjoying it as a recreational activity with a few bucks at stake. In fantasy sports, at the beginning of a season, users stage a draft to choose real-life players for their fantasy teams, and over the course of the year, those teams compile points based on how well the players do in the actual games. At the end of the season, the best team wins. This, he explained, is the same basic idea—but with two massive differences.
“It’s fantasy sports, but it’s every day,” he tells me, like a teacher instructing his none-too-bright student. “And it’s for money. Lots and lots of money.”
“There’s no way this is really legal. None. It’s totally sports betting,” I say, certain this is too good to be true, and that some government SWAT team is about to storm into our conversation and arrest Tomase.
“There’s some crazy legal loophole for fantasy, so they can do this,” he insists. “There’s two big companies, FanDuel and DraftKings. Even the sports leagues are behind it—look around, DraftKings ads are popping up in every stadium. I don’t know how they did it, but it’s all legit.”
Seduced by the possibilities, the night after Tomase’s introduction, I lie in bed dreaming on the chance of hitting it big on this crazy new thing. In the morning, I catch a flight to Toronto for our next series, Yankees–Blue Jays, and race to the press box in the Rogers Centre, home of the Jays. As fast as I can, I set up my computer and immediately go to FanDuel’s website. The home page is clean and attractive, white offset with green, the kind of green that makes me think of cash money. It asks me to create a username, and I put in “Pimpbotlove,” my go-to when I need a random moniker that is guaranteed to be available.
On their ads, FanDuel trumpeted a deposit bonus, saying they’d match every dollar I put in up to $200. A good deal, right? So I put the maximum $200 on my credit card, and figure that means I instantly get $400 to play with.
Not so fast. My account balance says I have only $200 worth. Where’s my $200 bonus? I didn’t expect to be able to withdraw the extra money instantly or anything crazy, but I figured I could use it to enter more games. Where is it?
Poring over the fine print, I find some galling language. The deposit bonus pays out at a rate of 4 cents for every dollar in entry fees—meaning I’d have to bet $25 to get $1 back. It would take months of playing and winning just to get that $200. Whatever. Too late. I’m in regardless.
