Script wielding sharks are overrunning daily fantasy sports sites and that’s just not good for business. To combat this legion of number crunchers the industry’s biggest site, DraftKings has introduced measures it hopes will level the DFS playing field.
Earlier this month, DraftKings announced that it would no longer allow players to use outside scripts on its site. As an alternative, DraftKings is introducing a suite of in-house scripts that any player can access.
The move is a definite compromise that’s designed to give advantage players the tools they love, while also making them available to less experienced players. (Whether or not newbies will actually use them remains to be seen.)
DraftKings is also taking steps to better identify more experienced players who are likely to prey on their less experienced peers. While the idea sounds good on papers, the site has yet to reveal who it will tag and how they’ll be identified.
The company has also instituted measures that will help players with 50 or fewer matches get matched up with other players of their skill level.
Those swarms of scrip-wielding sharks who prey on newbies are a familiar site to the online poker business, which is where a lot of them have migrated from. Not surprisingly, big-time online poker sites like PokerStars have also banned script use in an effort to protect recreational players.
Of course all of these measures to ring in sharks might not amount to much if the DFS is unsuccessful in convincing American lawmakers that DFS isn’t gambling anyways.