Mark Cuban is buying a company that caters to your daily fantasy recreations market, a good sign for players who regularly be involved in the contests.
Billionaire business owner Mark Cuban may be the outspoken owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and renowned for appearing on ABC’s ‘Shark Tank.’ The tycoon made their fortune when you’re ahead of the tech curve, now Cuban’s focusing their attention on another burgeoning industry: daily dream sports (DFS).
Fantasy laboratories, a platform of proprietary analytical information and tools that players can used 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 their excitement in joining the ongoing company since well. ‘The explosive growth of fantasy sports, and its involvement with new categories of competition like eSports, escalates the dependence on high-end resources like the platform offered by Fantasy laboratories,’ Cuban stated.
Bullish Maverick
Cuban’s interest in DFS comes at a notably astonishing time, taking into consideration the miami club casino new player bonus coast-to-coast legal battles daily fantasy operators are engaged 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 the state’s residents.
The Empire State AG is also attempting to fine the operators up to $5,000 per case for previous entry buy ins, a potential total of $3 billion should each of the 600,000 ny cases receive the penalty that is full.
That could 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 Labs 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 one other handful of states trying to punish the budding market have to rethink their ways.
‘It (day-to-day fantasy sports) has made viewing our games on TV more enjoyable,’ the NBA owner said recently. ‘Hopefully, the stupidity and hypocrisy in a few states will be cleared up into the courts shortly.’
Nationwide Gambling
During an meeting this week with Fortune magazine, Cuban said he believes gambling will become legalized around the world in the coming years and that online gambling might lead the means.
‘It’s inevitable. It’s going to take a moment for the courts to conquer the grandstanding by a district that is few, but as soon as that happens I do believe we will have a slow but sure availability of gambling throughout the country,’ Cuban said, jabbing Schneiderman right where it hurts.
Cuban has been snagging up entertainment and gaming organizations recently. He is a part-owner of Virtuix Omni and Magic Leap, two organizations making progress in the virtual and blended reality areas, since well as Unikrn, a platform much like DFS, but geared towards eSports.
Like any smart capitalist, Cuban invests only in companies and markets he believes sit for growth. Despite the ongoing legal saga surrounding DFS, Cuban’s interest is certainly a good indicator for the industry that is controversial.
Nevada Casino Revenues Up for Fifth Year in a Row
The crowds are back in Las Vegas once the town records its fifth yearly revenue increase for 2015. (Image: travelblog.viator.com)
Las Vegas has staged many a celebrity revival and now it’s staging one of its very own. The city which was once dubbed ‘ground zero regarding the world financial crisis,’ due to the fact downturn of 2008 crashed its property market and ravaged its casino industry, continued its bounce back once again throughout 2015.
This week the Nevada Gaming Control Board reported the town’s fifth year that is consecutive increases as a whole casino revenue.
The state’s major casinos reported a 2.9 per cent increase in revenues over 2014, at $24.6 billion, even though this is still 2.6 percent lower compared to 2007 pre-recession record high that is all-time.
The figures illustrate the shift away from reliance purely on video gaming, which comprised just 43.2 percent of the total haul, the industry’s lowest-ever percentage.
A recent LVCVA study suggested fewer people are coming to Vegas purely to gamble, or even to wager money at all while the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) recorded an all-time record for visitor numbers last year.
Just 12 percent associated with 41 million Vegas visitors in 2014 came primarily to gamble, according to the extensive research, although 71 percent put at the very least one bet during their stay.
Changing Market
Rather, the multitudes are coming for the non-gaming amenities: the restaurants, the nightclubs and pool parties, the shopping, and perhaps even for the daring feats such as for instance the Stratosphere’s bungee jump from 829 legs. Gambling, it appears, is indeed last century.
‘It’s a sign of the changing market,’ David Schwartz, director regarding the 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 spend more on food and activity than gambling. This is exactly what the visitors seem to want.’
And when all of the accounting had been done, Nevada’s casinos still showed a net lack of almost $661.8 million for the 12 months, although this figure was down 11 percent compared to the previous 12 months.
It’s almost as if the loss leaders are now totally reversed, with gaming being the shill for several the other money-making stuff that now lures site visitors to Sin City, in place of the other way around.
Caesars Spoils the Party
Much of this loss can be attributed to Caesars and the interest paid on its billions of bucks of debt, and to the writing out of assets as part of its bankruptcy proceedings.
Caesars’ predicament aside, the mood is positive. The industry’s losses have been narrowing every and analysts are optimistic that gaming may well find itself in the black again by the end of 2016, a year that is expected to break visitor records once again year.
Meanwhile, the off-Strip casinos are going from strength to strength. Downtown was hit specially difficult by the economic downturn.
As the big Strip hotels slashed their prices being a a reaction to the recession, downtown casinos had been forced to go also reduced in order to fill rooms at any cost.
But now, in a happier climate that is financial the Strip prices are up as well as the gambling enterprises of Fremont Street have actually reasserted themselves because the budget alternative Vegas experience.
Dutch Online Gambling Reforms Get Sudden Tax Migraine
Dutch Parliament within The Hague, where amendments have already been suggested towards the Remote Gambling Act that may doom the whole procedure to failure. (Image: euro-islam.info)
Holland’s gambling reforms, which try to modernize the Dutch on line and land-based gaming markets, have actually 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 anticipated to be rubber-stamped in belated 2014, but the Dutch Remote Gambling Act continues to be being debated by committee in the reduced House, with no end in sight.
It’s a shame, because foreign operators are lining around be section of what is actually a huge on line gambling revolution, or at least they were.
The fly that is latest in the ointment is the fact that the two 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 per cent rate for both on the web and land-based operators.
Online Gaming Searching Grim
It was enough to create leading gaming that is dutch tear their locks down. 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 gaming market would fail.
‘Operators have learned their lessons in other jurisdictions and we think desire for the market will decrease if and seriously when these motions pass parliament,’ he said.
Because probably the one overriding goal of the gaming that is remote was to channel Holland’s many enthusiastic online gamblers away from the overseas markets in order to higher protect consumers.
Since the country currently has no licensed gambling that is online whatsoever, it might be fair to state that 100 % of Dutch on line gamblers engage with these markets, which adds up to a projected 1.5 million adults.
Desire to associated with the bill ended up being to achieve a ‘channelization rate’ of 80 percent far from the market that is offshore toward the brand new licensed operators.
European Commission Supports Differentiation
A tax rate of 20 percent was deemed become a realistic way of achieving these ambitions. Overtaxing operators prevents them from competing effortlessly with their counterparts that are unlicensed which means the players only will go where the 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 association Euromat, which complained to the EC that the tax differentiation for land-based and online gaming businesses in Holland violated EU legislation.
Except it does not. The EC formally takes that differentiation as appropriate, and is happy to keep it as much as individual user states to decide upon, as was reaffirmed in 2014 by a land-based litigants case against the Danish licensing regime.
At worst, the brand new proposal can help to ascertain another failed European online gambling market. At most readily useful, it will be shot down, and certainly will postpone the method yet further.
Research by Holland Casino recently recommended that previous projections may have underestimated the scale associated with Dutch online gambling market and so it could possibly be worth over €1b ($1.1 billion) each year.