Came with a "pay $25 for a subscription" for a tool for season-long fantasy that I wanted or "deposit $25 at FanDuel and we'll give you access to our tool for free." I figured, why not try it--zero risk for me.
They do other sports as well, but I'm only interested in the NFL games.
The basics are simple: You are given a $60,000 budget. Players are priced according to perceived value and previous performance. The prices are set each week, but don't vary during the week.
Your task is to select a team of nine players--1 QB, 2 RB, 3 WR, 1 TE, 1 PK, 1 DST with pretty typical fantasy (PPR) scoring. At the end of the football games involved--can be Sunday only, all weekend, etc--to points are totaled and winners determined.
I've submitted line-ups two weekends to five games total and ended up in the money each time, so I have huge, huge winnings of an extra $40...I'll probably retire next week... But then I'm only choosing games like "double your money if you finish in the top 45%"--obvious house advantage, but a large space to end up in the money. I haven't played in anything with big winnings to only a few and nothing for everyone else. I'm confident enough in what I know that I can make reasonable choices to end up in the top half more often than not, but not arrogant enough to imaging I can out-think and out-luck 250,000 other people in a high risk/reward game.
Despite the loop-hole in federal law, it is, of course, gambling. Like some other games of chance--poker, for example--knowledge can modify your expected outcome if you are playing with folks not as focused on the domain of knowledge. So it has a larger component of skill than something like roulette.
But like poker or anything else, there is a very large component of luck on who does well that week, injuries, etc.
Playing in the games with a large number of low winnings winners, you can use the knowledge to put together groups that aren't likely to all go bad at once and have a number go well enough to make the top half. It's almost a risk minimization problem instead of a point maximization problem. That's where I feel the knowledge helps the odds.
The higher winning games are the opposite. To win them you have to not only select a lot of players who will "go off" in a particular week, but hopefully select players that others won't in order to differentiate yourself from their results. That is, to my mind, almost entirely luck.
If you're of a mathematical mind, think decision theory for the low-winnings game, game theory for the high-winnings game for the constraint management, but with high variability from luck.
Anyway, that's what it looks like to me these days.
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