Billion Dollar Fantasy: The High-Stakes Game between FanDuel and DraftKings That Upended Sports in America

In the interest of full disclosure: I play Daily Fantasy Sports on both FanDuel and DraftKings and have been since 2015. It was not until this year that I became profitable in the endeavor. It's apparent from the beginning that author Albert Chen has his own agenda. First, it must be that those who founded FanDuel were more than willing to share their time and experiences with Chen while those who founded DraftKings were a bit more hesitant (this, of course, is just my opinion after listening to the book). Chen offers precise insight into the goings-on at FanDuel from its infancy until the founders are forced out, but offers little insight into DraftKings. This not surprising, however, since the founders of FanDuel have long since left the company while the three original founders at DraftKings are still very much in control of their company. Chen must have taken it as a slight that DraftKings offered him limited access as he is more than willing to put his world view aside (Gambling = bad, Daily Fantasy Sports = REALLY BAD) when it comes to FanDuel but hammers Jason Robins and DraftKings at every opportunity. As I said, I play on both sites and have no particular allegiance to one or the other. This book reads as if it were alerting the world to Climate Change and that DrafKings, and to a lesser extent FanDuel, were polluting the world at a pace faster than China and India together. Chen cannot hide his disdain for daily fantasy sports and sports gambling. He offers very little from real player experience save for interviewing one bigtime shark (though he refuses to ever refer to him as a shark in the book) who has a crisis of conscience and, though Chen attempts to deny it, turns on the Daily Fantasy Sports industry. It's as though the shark says "I already made my $4.5 MILLION [I'm not exaggerating the sum], but now DFS is bad and people are not responsible enough and not smart enough to know how to play it, therefore, it's bad." I listened to this book hoping to find some fascinating insights in to the world of DFS. If I were looking for a book that praised FanDuel and bashed DraftKings, this would be it. But, that's not what I was looking for.