Populations Patterns of Daily Fantasy Sports Play

Abstract: Populations of gamblers can adapt rapidly to online sports betting services. Adaptation typically shows initial play increases followed by sharp betting (e.g., amount wagered and number of bets) declines. Currently, we know very little about whether these trends are evident for daily fantasy sports. Understanding this is important because daily fantasy sports is an immensely popular activity that many have compared with traditional gambling. To examine this issue, we conducted a longitudinal analysis of daily fantasy sports play on the DraftKings website. We followed 11,338 unique DraftKings players, tracking their overall levels of engagement (i.e., total contest entries, total contest entry fees, and total participation) for 27 months. In this paper, we present daily and monthly trends for these activities. We observed increasing engagement over time among a minority of the most involved players (i.e., the top 1% of players on each engagement metric). Less involved players (LIP), who comprised the majority of the player pool (i.e., the remaining 99% of players on each metric), tended to exhibit increased initial engagement followed by decreasing engagement over time. These LIP findings are consistent with exposure and adaptation models. Aggregate playing trends for all groups of players were seasonal. Implications: This study provides the first longitudinal analysis of actual daily fantasy sports playing trends using player records. In contrast to popular concerns about the activity, we determined that models of exposure and adaptation can help to explain aggregate trends of daily fantasy sports