Yeah, as someone who lived through this entire saga first-hand as well, it's...an OK article but it's really missing a lot of things.

DFS, in particular, was and is very legitimately a game of skill. (In fact, looking at it from an Elo perspective and from the perspective of "Who should win?", it's more of a game of skill than the sports themselves!) There was absolutely no reason for it to be made illegal, other than to protect the tribal gaming interests in California and Florida. They pushed back so hard and with such little justification that the tide really, really turned against them in a much more broad way than they ever anticipated.

The ironic thing is, Matt King at FD and Jason Robins at DK probably would have been perfectly happy if the outcome had been that they be allowed to merge and that DFS is legalized and regulated. Instead Robins is a billionaire and Flutter made the best corporate acquisition of the 2010s.

The article itself is garbage and I strongly believe it's AI generated.

But even on top of that, the coverage of this issue is severely lacking. There were already many online sports books "legally" HQ'd in the Caribbean or other offshore locales. They were pointed to as proof of how much money could be made and money won. That's the story. We allowed greed to addict millions of young men on sports gambling because we lost our spines in this country.

It doesn't matter if it's a game or skill it not. It's still gambling and it's still terrible. You can even argue that games of skill for money are worse than pure chance game because there is one more mechanism for people to get addicted: delusion of having an edge.

If DFS is legal roulette should be legal as well because it has fewer negative consequences for society.

I know it's popular narrative among pro gamblers that games of skill deserve a different (better) treatment but it's just self serving nonsense in my view (I've spent most of my adult life in a gambling world as both a pro player and software developer).

How is it being a game of skill better for society than random chance?

It's not a moral argument. Skilled games don't typically fall under gambling laws.

That’s not true. Poker is only legal in a few states where gambling otherwise isn’t. (This was true still back when gambling was legal in far fewer states.)

A game that is both skill and gambling (of which there are many) still generally is regulated as gambling.

Poker is very much a game of chance. It falls in the (known) gray area of gambling laws since it has some skilled elements.

Much lower risk of people getting addicted to games of skill, and much less expensive for people who do get addicted?

It's the opposite on both counts. There is additional mechanism to get addicted - delusion of having an edge. If you're a bad addicted player you will also lose more (cause others have an edge over you bigger than casinos at their games).

Chess is the biggest game on Twitch, but getting addicted to it is pretty rare, and you certainly don't hear of people losing their house over their chess addiction.

Chess is a great game but it is rare to play for money because you have a very accurate rating system and no luck, so you know to a high degree of certainty who is going to win before the game starts unless the players are very close in rank. You can’t fool yourself easily.

With games of skill that also have a strong luck element (poker, fantasy sports, betting horses, etc.) you can fool yourself very easily into thinking the odds are in your favor when they are not. If you won you thought it was because you played better, if you lost you got unlucky, and if you don’t track it (even many professional players don’t) you may have a hard time even knowing after a long sample size where you stood.

Gambling relies on the ability of anyone to get lucky and win on any given day mechanisms rely on inconsistent rewards.

People don't play it for money. I mean specifically they don't bet on outcomes of their own games. This is what gambling is.

Chess wouldn't be as addictive anyway. You need a bit more luck ingrained in the game mechanics to trigger the addiction mechanisms. In games of skill like poker people get deluded all the time because they see lucky wins of their opponents and unlucky losses of their own. People are very bad at making judgements about probability so a lot of them get deluded into thinking "if only unlikely X didn't happen 3 times recently I would be ahead".

This happens in both poker and sports betting. In both games you can always pick some unlucky events (ball hit the post, referee gave an unjustified penalty, the only card falling on the river) and point to them to say "if only" while missing all the small lucky events on your side.