DraftKings Clarifies Stance On Hot-Button Issues
Responding to a fresh round of concern from players regarding the integrity of contests, DraftKings issued its Community Guidelines policy on Thursday. The principles, which DraftKings co-founder Matt Kalish described as a part of a continuing effort, are intended to bring greater clarity to the existing Terms of Service and provide examples of behaviors that are acceptable and others that are not allowed.
“I think that DraftKings is still on the same crusade that we’ve been on for quite a while now,” Kalish said, “which is basically to increase the transparency in terms of game operation on the site, to make sure that we have really clear rules and guidelines for playing on DraftKings, and to make sure that our players really understand where we stand on all the major issues.”
The issue at the forefront for the DFS community in recent weeks has been allegations of collusion. Questions were first raised when a pair of players, one of whom won the PGA Tour Championship Millionaire Tournament on DraftKings, entered the maximum number of lineups with striking similarities, yet no duplicates. Other instances of apparent cooperation between players has since been noted. Many believed these lineups were clearly a coordinated effort to circumvent the 150-enty limit per user.
The discussion that unspooled around the issue brought forth a number of questions about what amount of cooperation is permitted and at what point does it cross the threshold of collusion. Prior to the introduction of the new Community Guidelines, DraftKings’ Terms of Service prohibited “colluding with any other individual(s) or engaging in any type of syndicate play,” but failed to provide clear definitions of what it considered collusion or syndicate play.
Though CEO Jason Robins has spoken on the issue in the past, the Guidelines provide official codification, clarifying that team-building a “set of complementary lineups which serve to work together, to execute a strategy that may create any unfair advantage over individual play,” is unacceptable behavior.
Kalish said in addition to the guidelines, DraftKings has formed a Game Integrity and Ethics team to monitor emerging issues and field complaints from the player base.
“I think the industry is very new still, it’s a few years in still and got big pretty recently, so a lot of things will come up for the first time and you’ll have a debate for the first time and there’s infinite hypotheticals out there,” Kalish said. “Like what if X, Y and Z comes up, what would you do? So, I think to some degree we know what the questions are on players’ minds and have already answered them, and to some degree these things come up, and what we wanted to do with the Community Guidelines, I think, is clarify and address a few issues that we knew were important right now, but also leave the door open and say this isn’t exhaustive.
“We know that there are going to be, over time, more questions that will potentially come up for rules of the road on the site, and we wanted to have a platform and a team in place that could deal with that.,” Kalish added. “So by forming the Game Integrity and Ethics team and putting up these initial guidelines, I think that’s a good first step and we’re now getting the initial emails that that team has received from players. I think we’ve gotten really good feedback and it’s a good first step, so we look forward to continuing with it.”
As first introduced, the guidelines touch on four topics. One that came to a surprise to many players is the prohibition on the use of pre-built teams from “lineup sellers.” Kalish said DraftKings believes the use of these lineups is counter to the spirit of a skill-based endeavor.
“I think what it comes down to is when you’re playing on DraftKings, it needs to be a reflection of an individual skill in playing fantasy,” he said. “I think playing fantasy is an open-book test, in a way. There’s tons of content out there, tons of research material through the Internet, and through talking with friends. You have access to tons of information. And so, when it comes time to sit down and build your lineup, I do think it’s like an open-book test, but it shouldn’t be like coming in with a cheat sheet. Like, if somebody hands you a lineup to play and you’re doing zero work, it’s not an open-book test, it’s like a cheat sheet. So I think that’s kind of where we came down on that.
“When you put in a lineup, it has to reflect your individual point of view on who are the best plays for that day and how to best fill lineups and anybody taking a pre-built lineup and putting it in on the site, that’s something that we’re definitely going to enforce to the best of our ability.”
The enforcement of these policies, however, could prove tricky, especially in instances of suspected collusion. Though Kalish said DraftKings has internal systems in place to monitor for abnormalities, determining what constitutes unacceptable cooperation and what is merely chance or acceptable, social sharing of information is a mammoth task.
DraftKings is hopeful the DFS community will help in its policing efforts and has created an email address where users can contact the Game Integrity and Ethics team to voice concerns.
“I can tell you there are kind of two paths here (regarding enforcement),” Kalish said. “One is we’ve created an email inbox, gameintegrity@draftkings.com, and anybody who plays on the site or anybody who wants to identify a situation that they view as potentially a game integrity issue, they’re always welcome to identify that in the inbox that we’ve created. So we have our team that monitors that, and when things through, it’s a priority for us to quickly look into those situations and try to understand if there’s anything to do there.
“And I can say that on the internal side we also have some things in place that are kind of a second stream of information on that front. I don’t want to get into the exact sort of logic that we would use to monitor the site for different things, but I can just tell you there are both of those paths that we’ll use.”