iGB North America magazine IGBNA Aug/Sep | Page 39

Feature

“I think more volatility is actually good thing,
as it gives less skilled players better chances
and odds.”

They are also pretty sophisticated, being
gamers themselves, playing some kind of
game for a significant number of hours a
week, or following the eSports scene for a
number of hours a week. One of those two
things is typically required for you to be
involved in fantasy sports, because if you are
not following the scene, you are just not going
to be interested in drafting a team.
On your website it says that $10m
of the $13m VC funding is offered
in prizes. Does this place you under
pressure to start funding prize pools
from sustainable revenue streams
within a certain time frame, or are
your investors taking the long view as
they are with DraftKings and FanDuel?
The investors are here for the long term,
and the prize money doesn’t really come
from the investment per se, it comes from
the entry fees that people deposit in order
to play games. For example, say there’s a
tournament happening and people put
in $10,000 in entry fees, we keep a small
commission on that and the rest is returned
in prizes to players, so that counts towards
the prize pool. The investor money just
helps us be able to make that commitment,
and guarantee that.
At present, team selections are locked
and no substitutions are allowed once
contests are underway. Can we expect
to see you introduce elements of
in-play to the model, i.e. with player
values changing during the game in
line with their performance, allowing
customers to draft in response to
injuries etc?

When we started off, we were essentially just
using the DraftKings, FanDuel model, so it’s
daily, and everything is locked at the start of
the day, and you can’t do anything till the end
of the day. And it’s very hard to improve upon
that model, because daily fantasy, at least
the money part of it, is highly regulated. You
can’t do betting, you can’t do results from just
one match, they have to be a set of matches,
and there are all these other provisions in the
UIGEA that are specific to fantasy. So it’s been
hard to change that model for real-money. So
what we’ve done is to have in-game betting
today, using virtual points, so not cash. So,
say you draft your real-money roster, and you
are watching the game, and in between you
have all these chances to win virtual prizes by
correctly picking the next event that’s about
to happen, i.e. which player is going to get
the first kill, A or B?, or who is about to hit
a certain objective in the game, that is three
minutes away. So, there’s as lot of in-game
stuff we do, and it’s very instant, and as far as
I know, we are the only site doing that. But I
don’t think you can do that with real-money
due to restrictions under UIGEA, so that
is why we are not touching that, and have
firewalled the system, so that all the new,
innovative stuff is being done with virtual
currencies, and all the traditional DFS stuff is
done with real-money.
I’ve read that the favourites win less
often in eSports than traditional
sports, making for more volatility. Is
this actually true, and what issues
does this present you with?
This is true. It’s built into the model, so the
salaries adjust based on performance. It
does make things more interesting, as it gives

less skilled players more of a chance to win,
whereas in traditional sports, if you do your
research, it’s easier to continue winning as a
fantasy sports player, because these things
are very skill-based. You will see the same
people winning again and again, week after
week, and accrue larger and larger balances,
unlike games of chance like roulette, where
anyone can win on any roll. I think more
volatility is actually good thing, as it gives
less skilled players better chances and odds.
And it makes the sport more interesting, as
people love drama, they love upsets, they love
interesting storylines.
Can you give a sense of how the
business has grown since you
launched the platform around six
months ago?
We are a private company, so we don’t
share all our numbers, but we are the most
transparent out there when it comes to
sharing numbers. To give you a sense of the
growth, in January, we estimated a $250k
prize pool for the entire year, in February that
turned into $1m, in March that turned into
$4m, and in May or June, we bumped that
up to $10m for the year, so the growth has
been a lot faster than expected. The response
from the community has been super strong,
we have already paid out more than half of
the $10m to date, so maybe the prize pool
will get bumped up again before the end of
the year. We were also the first eSports DFS
site to have a player that won $100,000 in
their first year, so we have a player, Yjingtong,
who netted $100k in the first five months
of eSports DFS. I think Playboy magazine
is trying to do a story on him, but he’s really
hard to get hold of!

iGamingBusiness North America | Issue 20 | August/September 2015 | 39