Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Dear Fan Duel & Kaiseroll13...

Wow, this has been the longest I've neglected my blog, I think ever.

But I think I finally have something to blog about, not just personal stuff.

It looks like Kaiseroll13 is a paid endorser of Fan Duel, based upon the banners I've found. (Refresh enough times, it will come up.)

And he's published too, according to his twitter feed.

Awesome. I'm glad there is a "daily fantasy pro" out there. I've never put up those dollar amounts.

Yet, a few questions remain.

First, who gave all of that action to Kaiser. And do those winnings include pushes (AKA tie games)?

You see, while I have been dormant in daily fantasy contests, I have always recruited new players. And through my projections website, I have always offered 1-on-1 support to all of my subscribers.

I have a few players whom I've counseled that have played Kaiser this baseball season on Fan Duel. In our collective experience - which includes me reviewing the games played against Kaiser - He has ALWAYS had an identical roster to the user ID "julielover" on games played against my subscribers. There are two other accounts I feel are similar duplicates, but I don't have enough data to make them statistically significant.

Also, Kaiser has never been logged in on Fan Duel at the same time as julielover (as long as I have been tracking both accounts online).

Given my horrible detective skills:

1) Best case scenario: Kaiser is giving his picks away to julielover, either to help "jl" win money, or to get more action by multiaccounting.

2) Worst case scenario: Kaiser (And Fan Duel, since they endorse each other) is using the INDENTICAL ROSTER, SPLIT PRIZE rule to inflate Kaiser's winning totals. It's not uncommon for endorsed pros to get 100% rakeback - so Kaiser can throw tons of entries online - and end up matching up with dozens of identical entries through his friend's accounts.

It would also explain why Kaiser doesn't play many autodraft games (if any), where there can be no identical rosters.

Bottom line, I call SOME shenanigans.

If Kaiser was THAT good, he would be killing Draft Zone and Snapdraft. To my knowledge he's not playing those sites - 'cause if he was, he's not winning there.

Even if he put up 5% of his Fan Duel numbers, he would be on the leaderboards elsewhere.

Am I wrong here? Smells funny to me.

1 comment:

Alex said...

Figured I'd give a semi-official response to this, since I'm a part time Fanduel employee...

-Kaiseroll13 wasn't paid for the ads, although frankly I don't see what the problem would have been if we had paid him.

-Players are free to discuss lineups with each other if they choose. There are plenty of people on all the daily sites who do, and there's no 'shenanigans' involved.

-The winnings listed in the ad came directly from our leaderboard. I believe they were compiled in late May, although I could be remembering wrong. I'm not sure of how ties are treated there, but the impact would be minimal in any case. And as you know, those are gross prizes won, not net profit.