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Billion Dollar Fantasy

The High-Stakes Game Between FanDuel and DraftKings That Upended Sports in America

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About this listen

The story of the rise of daily fantasy sports, and the brilliant entrepreneurs disrupting the way we consume sports

The inside story of the rise, fall, and rise of FanDuel and DraftKings - two companies that began as obscure startups and, seemingly overnight, became billion dollar companies, and just as quickly found themselves the target of the FBI and Department of Justice and the center of a national scandal.

Veteran sportswriter Albert Chen draws on candid, unprecedented interviews with every key player in tech, sports, gambling, and the fantasy leagues to create a breakneck narrative around a group of entrepreneurs, players, and gamblers. Billion Dollar Fantasy recounts the origins of modern gambling and fantasy sports in America, and follows the unlikely rise of the fantasy sports world through the lens of the two startups at the center of the story.

For fans of The Big Short,The Facebook Effect, or Bringing Down the House, this book tells the tale of a culture of risk, hubris, greed, redemption, and a group of larger-than-life characters trying to make sense of the complex new world they've created.

©2019 Albert Chen (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Football (American) Investing & Trading Social Sciences
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Sports betting and fantasy sports are a world I know almost nothing about, so I picked up this book because I find the sagas of modern business rivalries absorbing. On that point it does deliver, telling the tale of how this new form of gambli. . . . . .sorry "gaming", emerged in the middle of the last decade to challenge the established players and established conventions of an industry that has always existed half underground.

It's not a tale that anyone comes out of with shining credentials it must be said - Companies that cared about growth at any cost to their customers or their industry. CEO's who insisted for years that they weren't running a betting syndicate before performing an instant 180 degree turn the moment the legal climate changed. Casino operators who stoked moral fears about rival forms of gambling to crush competition: and government officials and politicians who managed to blunder about exhibiting all the corruption and incompetence one would expect.

The author clearly finds the personal stories, reflections and experiences of the principal characters a lot more interesting than the details of the economic and legal world they are operating in. Which I found a little frustrating as someone whose main interest is in business, I would have appreciated less time spent on hearing about people putting their kids to bed or meeting people in bars, and a little more about what was actually driving the whole thing.

The narrator does a decent job and even has a pretty good stab at the Belfast accent of some of the participants.

Enjoyable if a little unfocussed.

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