You know the public sector has gotten out of hand when fantasy football players have to assemble their own lobbying group. From Congressional Quarterly (sorry, no link — it’s a subscription-only service):

Fantasy sports enthusiasts have discovered the game of lobbying — and just in time to protect an exemption during last week’s markup of a House bill that would crack down on illegal Internet gambling.

The fans of fictional athletics are marshalling under the banner of the Fantasy Sports Association, which is being launched and bankrolled by the National Football League Players Association. Fantasy sports and industries connected to them, such as video gaming and online sports journalism, now account for an estimated $1 billion to $2 billion in annual revenue.

he fledgling trade group wants to keep that franchise buzzing by creating a clear exemption in Internet gambling law so that newspapers, television networks and Web sites involved with fantasy sports leagues may keep offering prizes, including cash. Currently, fantasy competition falls into a gray area of the law, under which most states presently permit cash prizes. The clear exemption the group seeks was written into the bill marked up by the House Judiciary subcommittee last week, which would restrict gambling businesses from accepting credit card payments. It’s also included in a second bill, which the House Financial Services Committee approved in March, barring credit card companies from processing transactions from illegal gambling sites.

The association argues that fantasy sports is a game of skill, not chance, because outcomes are determined by the subjective assessment that participants make when assembling their fictional teams. “Most of the people who would spend that much time manipulating their rosters are doing this for the passion they have for the game,” says acting association president Clay Walker, who also doubles as senior vice president of the NFL Players’ marketing arm, Players Inc. “It’s not like instant-win gambling.”

Of course, the poker players say the same thing. Frankly, I think the poker players have a better case. If you’re good, you can make a living playing poker. I don’t know of anyone who makes a living by dominating rotisserie leagues. Certainly there’s some skill involved in fantasy sports, but I don’t think it’s any more skill-oriented than conventional sports betting. It helps to have some knowledge of the game, the teams, and the players. But if Priest Holmes goes down with a freak hammy injury, he’s going to kill you if you put ten grand on the Chiefs the same way he’s going to kill you if he was your top pick in a $1,000/team fantasy league.

A better tack for these folks to take would be to defend the principle that what you do with your own money on your own time is none of the government’s damned business — whether it’s wagering on your stats-combing prowess, or wagering on dumb luck.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 11th, 2006 at 8:19 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Gambling and Poker, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.