New Philly.com FanDuel Fantasy Sports Gambling Website

Philly.com, the home of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News and the main place Delaware Valley residents go for their sports news has new website up and running called fanduel.philly.com.

Deposit amounts: Free (Practice Games only) - $10 +$5 Bonus - $25 +$10 - $100 + $20
You can withdraw your winnings (or leftovers) at any time.

You bet $5 to win $9. Meaning in a Head-to-Head game, you and one other person put in $5, meaning there is $10 on the game.  The winner of the game gets 90% of the amount bet, or $9. The House (Philly.com and/or FanDuel.com) gets 10% of the amount gambled, or $1.  The reason this is legal is because it's fantasy sports and fantasy sports are considered gambling because they require skill.

Right now there are MLB, NHL, and NBA games. Each game takes only 1 day to play. Only stats from one day of play is counted.  Here are the rules for MLB:

Pick a team of 9 players from the following games:
TEX @ CLE 9:05am PDT
ANA @ NYY 4:05pm PDT
MIL @ CHC 11:20am PDT
BOS @ MIN 10:10am PDT
HOU @ STL 10:40am PDT
NYM @ COL 12:10pm PDT
ARI @ LOS 7:10pm PDT
WAS @ PHI 12:05pm PDT
ATL @ SDP 3:35pm PDT
CWS @ TOR 4:07pm PDT
CIN @ FLA 4:10pm PDT
BAL @ OAK 7:05pm PDT
If your team scores more fantasy points than your opponent's, you win!
Each player has a salary, and you only have $35k to spend.
You must pick the following positions: P, C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, LF, CF, RF
The game starts at Tomorrow 9:05am PDT so enter before then.

There are 12 games tomorrow and this list includes all 12 games.  You have to pick 9 players, 1 at each position.  You have to set your roster before the first game of the day starts. If your roster scores more fantasy points than the other guy you win.  You have a salary cap of $35,000, which comes out to $3,889 per player.
Here is the most expensive player at each position.
P: Roy Halladay - 9,700
C: Joe Mauer - 4,000
1B: Albert Pujols - 3,900
2B: Chase Utley - 4,000
SS: Hanley Ramirez - 3,900
3B: Placido Polanco - 3,700
LF: Matt Holliday - 3,900
CF: Vernon Wells - 3,700
RF: Nelson Cruz - 4,100
This team's salary would add up to 40,900. So, you'd have you figure out how to save 5,900 somehow.  It seems that the salaries are based off season expectations, reputations, season stats, and match-ups. I definitely haven't analyzed it much, but not sure why the starting pitchers for tomorrow aren't the most expensive.  There's plenty of question marks on the prices, but I'm assuming they have some system to figure that out.

I guess the real question mark is can you pick your team better than the other person?

The other version is an Autopick draft version, where you rank your players and then the computer picks players in a snake order. You still need 1 player at each position in this case.

You can also do 5 or 10 player leagues in each sport.  For this situation it appears to only be salary cap and not autopick draft.  For these leagues, only the winner wins money, still 90% of the total bet, so $22.50 for $5 bet and $45 for $10 bet.

According to the leaderboard on the site, "kaiseroll13" has won 321 games already and has winnings of $5,364.

I find this fascinating that you can bet on DAILY fantasy baseball. Opening Monday to Closing Sunday minus 3 days for All-Star break is 178 days.  Assuming you always picked the right team and the crappy opponent, even with betting only $5 a day you could win $712 over the course of a season.

I haven't gone through the deposit system so I don't quite understand the Bonus deposit amounts yet.  If you can deposit $10 and get $5 in return, could you take out $15 then?  Assuming they've had that figured out, what about the percentage of bonus you get. 10-5, 25-10, 100-20 doesn't make sense.  The less you deposit the larger percentage bonus you get. Donate $100 and your balance would be $120, but donate $10 10 times and your balance would be $150.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments. Thanks to Chad Millman and his blog for the tip.

First Game of the Year

I went to the game last Thursday, down in DC. I understand that for the first 2 games of the series the crowd was more Phillies fans than Nationals fans.  In terms of loudness, Philly fans may have won, but in numbers there were probably more Nats fans for this 4:30pm start time game.  The weather was supposed to be bad, but it ended up being great and it didn't rain until probably 45 minutes after the game had ended.  Snuck down way lower than we were supposed to be sitting and greatly enjoyed the game, despite the fact that the Phillies lost.  Kyle Kendrick didn't look to good and the hitting wasn't the same as it had been the other games so far this season, but overall nothing too bad to complain about.  Congrats to the Nationals on their first win of the season and you could tell the fans were desperate for it, they actually got louder than the Phillies fan after the final out of the game.  Good luck to them and I hope they do better than the Mets and beat up on the rest of the NL East.  I won't be back in Philly until at least late May so this was one of my few opportunities to see the Phils in action.  Now its time to catch some cheap Orioles games.