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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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Fantasy sports: gambling or skill? Legislators talk about it

Wearing their Seahawks gear, lawmakers discuss legality of fantasy football

The Columbian
Published:
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State Republican Sen. Pam Roach, back left, listens to a resolution on the Senate floor in Olympia honoring the Seattle Seahawks on Friday.
State Republican Sen. Pam Roach, back left, listens to a resolution on the Senate floor in Olympia honoring the Seattle Seahawks on Friday. Roach is sponsoring a bill that would legalize paid fantasy sports leagues by formally defining fantasy sports as games of skill. Photo Gallery

OLYMPIA — On the last weekday before the Super Bowl, legislators wearing Seattle Seahawks gear made noise over a bill to allow Washington state residents to legally play fantasy football.

The activity has become increasingly popular in recent years with an estimated 40 million players participating each NFL season, often for money.

There has been debate, however, over whether it should be considered illegal gambling, based on luck, or a game of skill, which rewards knowledge.

Fantasy sports leagues invite players to compete against one another by selecting athletes from a league-wide pool and tracking how well they play. If Seattle’s Marshawn Lynch has a big game, the fantasy football team manager who selected him will get a boost.

The federal government and 45 other states consider fantasy sports as legal games of skill. Washington, Louisiana, Montana, Iowa and Arizona — site of Super Bowl 49, where the defending champion Seahawks will face the New England Patriots on Sunday — all consider fantasy sports illegal.

Bills that would legalize the practice are pending in Iowa and Montana. And on Friday, Washington state Sen. Pam Roach asked her legislative colleagues to support a plan to join the larger group.

Wearing a blue and green Seahawks scarf, Roach told the Senate Commerce and Labor Committee that her bill would formally define fantasy sports as games of skill. She supported the position, saying fantasy football is based on understanding factors including a player’s abilities and individual matchups.

Committee chairman Michal Baumgartner, a Spokane Republican, said he was surprised by the complexity of the debate around “what we thought was going to be a pretty simple bill.”

Officials from the state Gambling Control Board and a lobbyist for fantasy sports leagues turned up for the hearing to describe the issues involved.

A key topic of debate is whether season-long fantasy leagues should be regulated the same way as day-to-day leagues, which are popular online partly because of their money-earning potential.

The daily games have “all the same aspects of a game of skill” as longer leagues, Fantasy Sports Trade Association lobbyist Noah Reandeau said. “It’s not like there is a random number generator.”

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