Martin Crowley, the fantasy sports player accused of collusion to win DraftKing’s $1 million prize, said he has been cleared of the charges.
The Chicago-based player, who goes by the name “papagates,” was among the winners of DraftKings’ Sept. 24 “Fantasy Football Millionaire” contest, which yielded a $1 million prize. However, Crowley’s brother, Tom, also won a million dollar contest in the site last year, which prompted speculations that they two may have colluded to win the contest.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Crowley confirmed that DraftKings had banned him from accessing the site “for almost a week” while the company investigated the case. However, Crowley said “a DraftKings representative called him several weeks ago to say there was no evidence of wrongdoing and that he was eligible to play on the site again.”
DraftKings’ investigation focused mainly if the contest winner found ways around the site’s limits on how many entries each user can submit and the level of cooperation they can have with other players. Players are allowed to submit a maximum of 150 entries for Fantasy Football Millionaire. For that particular contest, there were almost 257,000 entries at $20 apiece. Winning the contest would require having high-scoring players that nobody else owns, which means that having more lineups with little overlap to other entries increases a player’s chance of winning.
FanDuel adds English Premier League to DFS roster
Meanwhile, DraftKings’ main rival, FanDuel, recently added a new sport to its daily fantasy sports lineup.
The DFS operator announced that it will roll out contests based on the English Premier League starting next week.
“Our ultimate goal is for fans of all sports to experience what FanDuel has to offer,” Nigel Eccles, CEO of FanDuel, said in a news release. “As we continue to enhance our core product, we look forward to giving the millions of U.S. soccer fans access to the same game day excitement that bring other sports fans to our platform.”
