Mark Cuban is investing in a company that caters to the fantasy that is daily market, an excellent sign for players who regularly participate in the contests.
Billionaire business owner Mark Cuban is the owner that is outspoken of NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and renowned for appearing on ABC’s ‘Shark Tank.’ The tycoon made his fortune when you are ahead of the tech curve, now Cuban’s focusing their attention on another burgeoning industry: daily fantasy sports (DFS).
Fantasy Labs, a platform of proprietary analytical data and tools that players can use to increase their DFS performance, announced this week that Cuban has made an undisclosed investment in the company.
‘We attracted an amount that is significant of from outside investors,’ Fantasy Labs said in a statement. ‘We identified Mark as the ‘dream investor’ … Bringing on Mark is a move that is strategic we couldn’t shun.’
Cuban expressed his excitement in joining the company as well. ‘The explosive growth of fantasy sports, and new categories to its involvement of competition like eSports, advances the need for high-end resources like the platform provided by Fantasy Labs,’ Cuban said.
Bullish Maverick
Cuban’s interest in DFS comes at a time that is somewhat surprising thinking about the coast-to-coast legal battles daily fantasy operators are involved in.
The conversation to determine whether DFS constitutes skill vs. luck-based games has proponents and antagonists vociferously voicing opinions on both sides of the debate from New York to California.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman recently ordered DraftKings and FanDuel to avoid accepting wagers from their state’s residents.
The Empire State AG is additionally attempting to fine the operators up to $5,000 per instance for previous entry buy ins, a potential total of $3 billion should each of the 600,000 New York cases receive the full penalty.
That would likely lead both DFS platforms into bankruptcy.
Fantasy Labs is attractive to investors, them a way to enter the market without actually offering daily fantasy contests as it gives.
Fantasy laboratories is a tool that is third-party gives users added research and leverage in selecting their rosters on DFS websites.
Regardless, Cuban thinks Schneiderman and the other handful of states trying to punish the budding market have to rethink their ways.
‘It (day-to-day fantasy sports) has made watching our games on TV more enjoyable,’ the NBA owner said recently. ‘Hopefully, the stupidity and hypocrisy in a states that are few be cleared up in the courts shortly.’
Nationwide Gambling
This week with Fortune magazine, Cuban said he believes gambling will become legalized across the country in the coming years and that online gambling might lead the way during an interview.
‘It’s inevitable. It’s going to take the time for the courts to overcome the grandstanding by a few district attorneys, but when that happens I do believe we will have a slow but certain availability of gambling across the nation,’ Cuban said, jabbing Schneiderman right where it hurts.
Cuban has been snagging up entertainment and gaming companies recently. He’s a part-owner of Virtuix Omni and Magic Leap, two companies making progress in the virtual and blended reality markets, because well as Unikrn, a platform much like DFS, but geared towards eSports.
Like any capitalist that is smart Cuban invests only in companies and markets he believes are situated for growth. Despite the ongoing legal saga surrounding DFS, Cuban’s interest is definitely a positive indication for the controversial industry.
Vegas Casino Revenues Up for Fifth in a Row year
The crowds are back in nevada whilst the town records its fifth revenue that is yearly for 2015. (Image: travelblog.viator.com)
Las Las Vegas has staged many a celebrity revival and now it is staging one of a unique. The city that has been once dubbed ‘ground zero of this globe crisis that is economic’ once the downturn of 2008 crashed its property market and ravaged its casino industry, proceeded its bounce back throughout 2015.
This week the Nevada Gaming Control Board reported the city’s 5th consecutive year for increases in total casino revenue.
The state’s major casinos reported a 2.9 percent boost in revenues over 2014, at $24.6 billion, even though this remains 2.6 percent lower than the 2007 pre-recession record high that is all-time.
The figures illustrate the shift away from reliance purely on video gaming, which constructed just 43.2 percent of the total haul, the industry’s lowest-ever percentage.
As the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) recorded an all-time record for visitor numbers last year, a recent LVCVA research suggested fewer folks are coming to Vegas purely to gamble, if not to wager cash at all.
Only 12 percent regarding the 41 million Vegas visitors in 2014 came primarily to gamble, based on the research, although 71 percent put at the least one bet club player casino desktop during their stay.
Changing Market
Rather, the multitudes are coming for the amenities that are non-gaming the restaurants, the nightclubs and pool parties, the shopping, and possibly even for the daring feats such as the Stratosphere’s bungee jump from 829 feet. Gambling, it seems, is really century that is last.
‘It’s a sign of the changing market,’ David Schwartz, director of this University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Center for Gaming Research, told NevadaAppeal.com this week. ‘Food is growing and gaming as a percentage is shrinking. The things I’m hearing from people is they save money on entertainment and food than gambling. This is exactly what the visitors seem to want.’
And whenever all the accounting was done, Nevada’s casinos still showed a loss that is net of $661.8 million for the year, even though this figure was down 11 percent compared to the previous 12 months.
It’s nearly as if the loss leaders are now completely reversed, with gaming being the shill for several the other stuff that is money-making now lures site visitors to Sin City, rather than the other way around.
Caesars Spoils the Party
A lot of this loss can be attributed to Caesars and the interest paid on its billions of bucks of debt, and to the writing down of assets included in its bankruptcy proceedings.
Caesars’ predicament aside, the feeling is positive. The industry’s losses have been narrowing every 12 months, and analysts are optimistic that gaming may well find itself in the black again by the conclusion of 2016, a 12 months that is anticipated to break visitor records again.
Meanwhile, the casinos that are off-Strip going from strength to strength. Downtown was hit specially difficult by the downturn that is economic.
As the big Strip hotels slashed their prices being a response to the recession, downtown casinos were forced to go even low in order to fill rooms at any cost.
But now, in a happier financial climate, the Strip costs are up as well as the casinos of Fremont Street have reasserted themselves while the budget alternative Vegas experience.
Dutch Online Gambling Reforms Get Sudden Tax Migraine
Dutch Parliament in The Hague, where amendments have already been recommended to your Remote Gambling Act which could doom the whole process to failure. (Image: euro-islam.info)
Holland’s gambling reforms, which make an effort to modernize the Dutch online and land-based video gaming markets, have been slow-moving, to say the smallest amount of.
Drawn up in 2013 to overhaul the nation’s 50-year-old laws that are existing they were at first expected to be rubber-stamped in belated 2014, nevertheless the Dutch Remote Gambling Act continues to be being debated by committee in the low House, with no end in sight.
It’s a shame, because foreign operators are lining around be element of what could be a huge on line gambling revolution, or at least they were.
The fly that is latest in the ointment is the fact that the 2 ruling coalition parties seemed this week to have suddenly and unexpectedly flip-flopped on the 20 percent tax rate for online gambling companies. Instead, they propose a blanket 29 percent rate for both on the web and land-based operators.
Online Gaming Looking Grim
It had been enough to make leading gaming that is dutch tear their locks out. One Netherlands that is such gaming, Justin Franssen of Kalff Katz & Franssen, told eGaming Review that there was now a ‘real likelihood’ that the Dutch online video gaming market would fail.
‘Operators have learned their lessons in other jurisdictions and we think desire for the market will seriously decrease if and when these motions pass parliament,’ he said.
Because probably the one overriding goal for the gaming that is remote was to channel Holland’s many enthusiastic online gamblers away from the offshore markets in an effort to higher protect consumers.
Since the country currently doesn’t have licensed gambling that is online whatsoever, it will be fair to state that 100 % of Dutch on line gamblers engage with these areas, which adds up to a predicted 1.5 million adults.
The goal for the bill was to achieve a ‘channelization rate’ of 80 percent away from the market that is offshore toward the new licensed operators.
European Commission Supports Differentiation
A tax price of 20 percent was deemed to be a realistic method of attaining these aspirations. Overtaxing operators prevents them from competing efficiently with their unlicensed counterparts, which means the players only will go where this product is more desirable.
It seems that the politicians can be bowing to pressure from litigation launched year that is last land-based video gaming relationship Euromat, which complained to the EC that the tax differentiation for land-based and online gaming businesses in Holland violated EU law.
Except it does not. The EC formally takes that differentiation as appropriate, and is happy to leave it up to specific user states to make a firm decision, as was reaffirmed in 2014 by a land-based litigants case up against the Danish licensing regime.
At worst, the brand new proposal can help to determine another failed European online gambling market. At most useful, it will be shot down, and will wait the method yet further.
Research by Holland Casino recently suggested that previous projections may have underestimated the scale for the Dutch online gambling market and it could be worth over €1b ($1.1 billion) each year.