FanDuel CFO says poker is not a game of skill
The Daily Fantasy Sports boss has enraged poker players in a TV interview.
For those of you who have not been following, the popular US game of Daily Fantasy Sports has been having a tough time of late. While the industry has marketed itself as a game of skill, regulators in the US have seen things differently and classed it as a form of gambling, like regular sports betting.
The game itself has been marketed much like poker in terms of the skill edge that can be enjoyed, as well as the tournament-esque formats that are like the game we know. Indeed, many former poker professionals have migrated over to DFS in the US because the skills needed to beat them are so similar.
With that in mind, you would expect there to be a degree of solidarity between the poker industry and the DFS industry. That does not appear to be the case for FanDuel CFO Matt King who has made the surprise claim that poker is not a game of skill (while still holding firm that DFS is).
He told Walt Bogdanich of PBS’s Frontline that poker wasn't a skillful game, saying:
There is a lot of academic research on this, what’s the skill versus luck kind of spectrum. The reality is within poker, every time you shuffle the deck, it creates an element of luck that trumps it basically to being much more a chance-dominated game than a skill-dominated game. If you look at our data, the players that are good, are frankly consistently good. It is truly a game of skill.
While nobody is ever likely to agree on the exact proportion of luck vs skill in poker, King's claims have very little grounding, as too many studies to mention have demonstrated that poker is indeed a game of skill, so much so that many countries and courts have declared it as such.
Most poker players recognise that Daily Fantasy Sports (and sports betting in general) is also skill orientated. Given how easily professional poker players have made the move to DFS, and the fact that poker players have been a core part of DFS's marketing campaigns, it is very surprising that King would throw an industry like poker under the bus in this way.
