Love daily fantasy sports but aren’t thrilled with the “daily” part of it? Well DraftKings has just the thing for you. Kind of. It is still “daily” fantasy sports, but DraftKings’ new “Leagues” injects the added twist of being able to play all season long with your buddies!
Traditional fantasy sports are great fun. You get together with your friends for the draft – mostly online nowadays, but many still make a holiday of it and have a live draft bash – and then spend the entire season talking trash and offering up ludicrous trades. Amongst friends, even fantasy leagues (known as “rotisserie” leagues back when I was a youth) played for no money can be a blast, as off-season bragging rights make the champion feel superior to his stupid opponents.
In daily fantasy, though, that camaraderie, that friendly hatred, isn’t there. Instead, it is actual hatred, as all of your opponents are strangers and all obviously cheating because there’s no way anyone know Marcus Mariota was going to go off like that. The personal fun of fantasy is gone with DFS, though you also don’t have to deal with people dropping out over the course of the year (or you yourself can stop playing with no repercussions).
DraftKings aims to bring the best of both worlds together with Leagues. Anyone can start a league on DraftKings and invite friends to join. From there, the members of the league play in DFS contests selected by the league’s commissioner, just as they might normally. The games can be for money or can be for free, whatever everyone agrees upon. And that’s really the gist of it – play DFS against your buddies year-round.
There is no requirement for players to participate in every contest in their league. Of course, they won’t have the chance to climb their league’s leaderboard and earn bragging rights if they don’t play frequently, but that’s really up to the players and how they want to handle shame. Commissioners can also setup recurring contests so that everyone knows ahead of time what to expect.
There’s not much to Leagues, but it sounds like a pretty cool offering. I mean, might as well, right? And what’s nice is that it’s not like it will get in the way of the regular contests; aside from a player’s DFS budget, there’s no reason someone can’t participate in a league and play in their normal GPP’s and what-not. For DraftKings, it will not only likely result in happier players, but should also bring new customers to the table. Players can invite their friends to their league via text, e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter, and those invitees don’t need to be current DraftKings customers to receive the invite. Thus, Leagues will inevitably get new people aboard the DFS train.
Leagues launched on Tuesday, just in time for the start of the NFL season, which is less than a month away.
