Billion Dollar Fantasy: The High-Stakes Game Between FanDuel and DraftKings That Upended Sports in America

I'm nearly finished reading this extremely well written book that sheds new light on a fascinating topic. Who knew that a book on FanDuel and Draftkings could be such a great human drama. The writer does a great job of bringing to life characters that you feel invested in and care about. Highly recommended!

Albert Chen's Michael Lewis impersonation is excellent...great coverage and excellent storytelling.

This was a nice surprise! With this book, you may start off expecting to learn more about fantasy sports and end up with lessons in business, startups, government, personal agendas, luck, highs, and lows with a cast of characters and events that would be a total 'fantasy' except that it happened. This was hard to put down, and a nice combo of storytelling and facts.

Interesting topic, but it is very repetitive - and the story, despite great access is just not as interesting as the parts. Enjoyed Chen's work at SI but this one is not up to that.

The first 175 pages are very good and the last chapter is very good but there's a pretty heavy lull in the book for about 50+ pages that seem like filler. So for that I can't give it 5 stars but the book is definitely interesting and worth reading. As a sports fan and a gambling fan who has played in DFS games, it was cool learning the back story of two very different companies with the same vision

I'm not a fantasy sports player, so was a little skeptical when I got this book -- but within a few pages I really got into it. It's such a fascinating story, would never have expected it -- highly recommend it for both fantasy sports fans and also people like me!

The sports gambling industry is about to be massive and control major amounts of capital. This book tells the story of how a little known loophole allowed a group of businessmen to capitalize on a market no one else saw. Very much a story about how personality influences business and can destroy and create companies, this book presents an incredible take on the high stakes race to build the winning fantasy franchise.

In the interest of full disclosure: I play Daily Fantasy Sports on both FanDuel and DraftKings and have been since 2015. It's apparent from the beginning that author Albert Chen has his own agenda. First, it must be that those who founded FanDuel were more than willing to share their time and experiences with Chen while those who founded DraftKings were a bit more hesitant (this, of course, is just my opinion after reading the book). Chen offers precise insight into the goings-on at FanDuel from its infancy until the founders are forced out, but offers little insight into DraftKings. This not surprising, however, since the founders of FanDuel have long since left the company while the three original founders at DraftKings are still very much in control of their company. Chen must have taken it as a slight that DraftKings offered him limited access as he is more than willing to put his world view aside (Gambling = bad, Daily Fantasy Sports = REALLY BAD) when it comes to FanDuel but hammers Jason Robins and DraftKings at every opportunity. As I said, I play on both sites and have no particular allegiance to one or the other. This book reads as if it were alerting the world to Climate Change and that DrafKings, and to a lesser extent FanDuel, were polluting the world at a pace faster than China and India together. Chen cannot hide his disdain for daily fantasy sports and sports gambling. He offers very little from real player experience save for interviewing one bigtime sharp (though he refuses to ever refer to him as a sharp in the book) who has a crisis of conscience and, though Chen attempts to deny it, turns on the Daily Fantasy Sports industry. It's as though the sharp says "I already made my $4.5 MILLION [I'm not exaggerating the sum], but now DFS is bad and people are not responsible enough and not smart enough to know how to play it, therefore, it's bad." I read this book hoping to find some fascinating insights in to the world of DFS. If I were looking for a book that praised FanDuel and bashed DraftKings, this would be it. But, that's not what I was looking for.