This week Alabama became the 12th US State to bar its residents from playing on daily fantasy sports sites. The move was announced by Alabama State Attorney General, Luther Strange in a news conference on Tuesday.
Strange also announced that his office had sent out cease and desist notices to daily fantasy sports operators directing them to stop doing business with Alabama residents.
In his letter, Strange pulls no punches and calls out the daily fantasy sports business as merely another form of illegal gambling saying:
As Attorney General, it is my duty to uphold Alabama law, including the laws against illegal gambling. Daily fantasy sports operators claim that they operate legally under Alabama law. However, paid daily fantasy sports contests are in fact illegal gambling under Alabama law.
Alabama law, it should be noted, does not make a distinction between games of skill and games of chance, when it comes to gambling. In their legal code, a game becomes moves from fun to illegal when a player puts up something of value (cash) in order to win a prize (in this case, more cash), according to Alabama news site AL.com.
Despite not recognizing the skill vs chance dynamic as a legal argument Strange went on say that daily fantasy sports isn’t a game skill anyways. In doing so, he pointed to factors that are beyond the control of even the most skilled daily fantasy sports players, such as injuries and weather.
Alabama’s announcement lays bare the struggle that daily fantasy sports operators are facing in the United States. While a few states, like Colorado, are working to make a distinction between DFS and traditional real-money gambling, plenty of states are content to ban real money daily fantasy sports out right.
In short, the US-facing daily fantasy sports industry is facing a very expensive state-by-state fight.