Gary Loveman, former CEO of Caesars Entertainment and a proponent of legalised online poker in the US, says that the current boom in daily fantasy sports and its legal status could provide a window of opportunity for efforts to federally legalise online poker.
DSF is currently legal in all but five US states thanks to exemptions for traditional fantasy sports under federal legislation, but there have been calls for more regulation on grounds that the booming daily fantasy sports genre constitutes de facto gambling.
Opponents of this view say that DFS is essentially a skill-based pursuit and falls outside the definition of gambling, but the focus on this debate could provide positive arguments for online poker, which is also a skill-dominated game.
Loveman explained his optimism in an interview with Nevada Public Radio this week, pointing to the many DFS deals that major sporting bodies have entered into, and the growing tendency by major sports bodies to reconsider their positions on legal sports betting outside the restrictions of the PASPA i.e. wider that Nevada, Delaware, Oregon and Montana.
“Once the NFL moves to the point where they in fact favor this, I think you will see a federal action that legalizes sports betting,” Loveman said. “Once that Rubicon has been crossed, I think poker will very naturally fall in because it has a lot of similarities to fantasy sports.”