I’m shocked, shocked, to see that employees of one fantasy site are winning big money on another fantasy site!

In many of the contests with large purses, a select few entries earn lots of money, while most lose the cost of the entry fee. Thus, building lineups able to take advantage of market inefficiencies are valuable. Knowing where those inefficiencies are, then, can provide an advantage to a person with information. It’s a similar concept to things like winning a March Madness pool, where coming in 10th isn’t any better than coming in 50th. In pools like that, I would love to know what others were picking, in setting my selections, to try to find value. You may wonder how DraftKings info on ownership could benefit in FanDuel, and vice versa. The sites’ values are going to be similar, though not exact, and with a large sample size, it can be a decent indicator of behavior at the other site.

Full disclosure, Baseball Musings has a business relationship with USA Today Sports, which also owns Daily Fantasy Site FantasyScore.

The companies did their own internal investigation and found no wrong doing:

In a statement issued early Tuesday morning, DraftKings said that it conducted a “thorough investigation, including examining records of internal communications and access to our database,” and found that “this employee could not have used the information in question to make decisions about his FanDuel lineup.”

The employee admitted to inadvertently releasing data before Week 3 NFL games, the New York Times reported on Monday. DraftKings, in its statement, said that the “employee in question did not receive the data on player utilization until 1:40 p.m. ET on Sept. 27,” and FanDuel lineups locked at 1 p.m. ET.

“This clearly demonstrates that this employee could not possibly have used the information in question to make decisions about his FanDuel lineup. Again, there is no evidence that any information was used to create an unfair advantage and any insinuations to the contrary are factually incorrect,” DraftKings said in the statement.

Both companies now prohibit employees from playing these games.

I have no problem with someone playing on another site, even with inside information. These are games of chance, and sometimes the information will help you a bit, but many times, through a fluke, everyone who is supposed to play well plays poorly. This guy got lucky, but in the long term, everyone who plays these games lose, because the house takes in less than they pay out. Only a handful of people will come away on top.