Grand Fantasy Sports: Bridging Casino-DFS Gap
While most of the casino industry has viewed the rise of DFS as a threat, at times taking drastic measures to try to stem the growing market, Grand Casinos based in Minnesota has a different perspective.
Don’t fight these potential customers. Embrace them.
That’s the message they’re pushing with the launch of GrandFantasySports.com, a new daily fantasy platform that seeks to make it easier for casinos to get involved in DFS and bring a “even playing field” to players.
“Grand Fantasy Sports is built on a daily fantasy platform that we built which specifically allows casinos to white-label the platform as their own,” CEO Jim Ryan said on the RotoGrinders Daily Fantasy Fix podcast earlier this week. “So they use their branding, they market it to their audience and use their marketing to acquire players.”
The hope is that having quick and easy access to an existing platform will be appealing to casinos in states where DFS has recently been made explicitly legal through legislative action, and convince those in states where the legality is still in question to view DFS as an opportunity instead of a threat or competing market.
“I think one of the things we bring to the table in that arena is that suddenly (the casinos) have an option so they see they can participate (in DFS) without having to go and buy or build their own platform,” Ryan said. “They can easily get involved. It can be very advantageous to them. They can get all the advantages of having their own, branded product without having to necessarily be the operator, per se.”
So far, so good, Ryan says. While Grand Fantasy is taking a conservative approach as far as the states in which it is offered, he said the company is in “deep discussion” with a number of potential casino partners and anticipates expansion in the near future.
Currently, GrandFantasySports.com is available to players in California, Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Ryan said he anticipates being available to players in New York soon.
Grand Casinos isn’t the first in the brick-and-mortar casino industry to dip a toe in the DFS waters, but unlike Vic Salerno’s Las Vegas-based US Fantasy, GrandFantasySports.com comes in a format that will be much more familiar to players; namely, the industry-standard salary-cap style game.
The site offers the traditional contest formats (GPPs, 50/50s, etc.), with buy-ins at different intervals up to $25. Look for growth on all fronts from the site as more casinos come on board and add to the pooled player liquidity, Ryan said.
“There are multiple thousand dollar prize pools every day,” Ryan said. “That will be increasing as additional partners come on line throughout the season.”
Also unlike other previously proposed DFS-casino partnerships, players don’t have to visit a casino’s physical location to play, though the outreach opportunities certainly present a selling point for potential partners.
“One of the things that our platform allows is the casinos to have all of the promotion and white-space advertising space in the game itself to promote events, activities, promotions that they might be running in their brick-and-mortar sites,” Ryan said. “We also have the ability for them to integrate people who are part of their loyalty clubs into our platform so that we can report back to them frequency of play, etc., and depending on the individual casino, they can make the determination if they want to offer points, rewards for participation in DFS, as well as participation at the brick-and-mortar.
“The other thing you have to remember is casinos are very interested in reaching out to players when they’re not at the casino,” he added. “And just by its nature, daily fantasy or weekly fantasy, it’s a more frequent outreach to the players to get them involved, keep them top of mind and again recognize that this is brought to you by the casino and it’s something you can do and participate in and enjoy without necessarily having to be at the casino. So it really extends their reach, if you will.”
So the benefit to casinos is apparent, but Ryan said the advantages Grand Fantasy Sports offers to casual players is just as great, as one of the site’s primary aims is evening the playing field.
To that end, GrandFantasySports.com keeps all contestants anonymous until the contest begins, thereby eliminating the practice of “bum-hunting,” or lobby prowling for advantageous matchups with inexperienced players. Ryan also said Grand Fantasy keeps a relatively low cap on max entries and monitors entries to prevent automated access by third-party scripts that have been used in the past by some high-volume players.
“That combination of those three things gives the person who loves playing fantasy and really enjoys it and wants to play occasionally and would like to have an even chance to win, a very fair, level playing field that they can compete on,” Ryan said.
Ryan added that in the first month of the NFL season, 90 percent of players on GrandFantasySports.com won in at least one contest.