Frontline documentary on Fantasy Sports gambling creates more trouble for we the online gamblers

I was very interested in watching their documentary tonight on fantasy sports gambling. 

I thought, for the first time, they would explain how a minuscule percentage of winners collect all the profits, thereby opening the eyes of the average joe public bettor to the true odds of winning 'the big prize' or any reasonably sized prize (i.e. virtually nil).

Did Frontline, a show I love, decide to do this? No they did not.

Instead, after about 10 minutes of largely worthless fantasy sports gambling explanation, they pulled the old bait and switch on guess who? Us.

Somehow the program started attacking sports betting websites, their payments processors and revealed the data centers of many offshore books are US based (that is the content for the site may be run out of NY while the actual bet is processed offshore).

So they tell this to a bigshot government lawyer and he says that of course is 'very interesting' to him and he'll be looking into it.

Betonline and Pinnacle were featured gambling sites by the documentarians. While I don't use these sites of course, just the fact that ANY online gambling site was featured turns my stomach. We the gamblers, have put up with more than enough to make a simple online bet and over the years we have had our credit card companies block our deposits, had our sites stop sending checks out of fear, and had many of our favorite sites fold up completely.

With the rise of fantasy sports and more encouragingly, ESPN featuring spreads on their show, we caught a break as betting becomes more mainstream and accepted the general public. 

But tonight Frontline went out of its way to attack just that, as though this is 2006 and the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was just passed. 10 years behind the curve...imagine that...

I'm a bit sick to my stomach because all it takes is the NY State Attorney General to lift a mere finger towards these sites and they will run for the hills like the poker sites did on Black Friday.

Terrible job by Frontline and terrible job not telling the real story of how there are almost no winners in the fantasy gambling arena.

Hopefully nothing that adversely affects us comes of this...

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/fantasy-sports-gamble/

This doc probably doesn't tell anyone things they don't already know. I do however love how they mixed both fantasy and sports betting in the same video. People told us one was gambling and one wasn't.

Make up your mind.

unsure why the feds care.

fantasy poker online gaming

these industries should be

regulated but allowed in my opinion.

For all of the positives your country has, This is bordering on Saudi Arabia style with how they want to control what you can and can't do with your money. 

The government's primary concern is that it will corrupt the various leagues, particularly college, which of course, after the recent tennis betting scandal, can be true. 

But there is a Saudi Arabian "morality police" element to it as you noted which politicians grandstand on to 'save the children' and addicts. The rest of us get dragged in.

If enough people want sports gambling legal, they will make that known to their congressmen and the laws will change.

The fact is a very small percentage of people care about this issue enough to get the law changed, and in the current political climate there is very little consensus to get anything done.