This has a been a crazy week for daily fantasy sports.
The industry, projected to bring in $14 billion in revenue by 2020, has been under scrutiny after DraftKings employee Ethan Haskell admitted to "inadvertently" releasing sensitive data about a large tournament in the same week that he reportedly won $350,000 on DraftKings' rival site FanDuel.
Even more alarming: DraftKings employees reportedly won nearly $6 million playing at FanDuel.
Today, the industry is taking steps to end that kind of cross-play.
FanDuel made an official decision Wednesday.
"We have permanently banned our employees from playing any daily fantasy games for money on any site," the company said in a statement to the press. "We will also require all customers to confirm that they are not an employee of any other third-party fantasy site, and if they are, they will not be allowed to access our site."
The scandal was first reported last week on the industry blog DFS Report and then broken open by The New York Times Monday night. In DFS, you "draft" a team of players for one week, and if your team does better than your opponents' teams, you win.
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The story has made it all the way to Capitol Hill, with US Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) reportedly saying that "there's absolutely scandalous conduct taking place" in fantasy sports and Congress should examine its legality.
Yesterday, the Fantasy Sports Trade Association trade group, FanDuel, and DraftKings issued a joint statement saying that the incident with Haskell had "sparked a conversation" about where industry employees should be able to play on competitors' sites.
DraftKings has previously said that it has decided to "prohibit employees from participating in online fantasy sports contests for money," and Tech Insider has reached out to see if it's permanent.
What does this mean? Given how remarkably skill-based the game is, DFS will still strongly favor the expert "shark" players over the novice "fish" players — but it looks like DFS is about to get less incestuous. At least in theory, instead of the DraftKings and FanDuel employees taking home prize money, it'll be users.
Just how much that actually cuts down on the shark vs. fish scenario that dominates DFS remains to be seen, since experts say that it's the nature of the game.
But the ban on employee play can't be bad news for regular people playing the game. If data on rosters is floating around as loosely within organizations as people like Legal Sports Report editor Chris Grove have speculated, then that's a huge advantage over non-employee users.
So this move could — possibly — work toward evening the fantasy playing field.
If you're still in the dark about how daily fantasy football works, we've made this handy infographic:
