FanDuel: Please Stop Being Worse Than Offshore Sportsbooks For Touchdown Bets

The top sports betting operator in the United States now has what I think is a very bad policy on a specific market for football bets that is screwing bettors. And it’s one where even offshore sportsbooks fairly treat their customers.

Let’s set the stage:

Sunday night’s NFL game between the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Giants was a primetime game, likely with a lot of betting action. Of course, it became a snoozer (unless you bet the total) as the Cowboys won 40-0.

The problem at FanDuel arose early in the game, however. Most sportsbooks offer “first touchdown scorer” markets. These include many players and usually “defense/special teams” as a catch-all for any other potential scores.

The Cowboys scored the first touchdown of the game: a blocked field goal returned by Noah Igbinoghene. Cool, people who bet the Dallas defense won, right? Wrong.

You can find more than a handful of examples of people complaining about this, and it’s been amplified on “Gambling Twitter.” And from the looks of things, this has happened before.

So, why are these bets losers? This is from FanDuel Sportsbook’s house rules:

For settlement purposes, "Team Defense" selections do not include Special Teams.

To be fair, FanDuel is pretty up-front about this. Here is what you get when you click on a touchdown market:

That’s…pretty clear. Bettors who thought they were also getting special teams in their bets didn’t read the house rules or didn’t understand them, and I am not terribly sympathetic. (According to Wayback Machine, the FanDuel house rules changed at some point to include that “special teams” passage above.)

To be clear, no one was paid on the first TD scorer market; the Dallas defense scored the game's second touchdown on an interception return. Bets on the defense would have been graded winners had the second touchdown been the TD graded for this market. And there are a few examples of people posting chats with FanDuel support:

It’s also funny that FanDuel posted this on Twitter, and then literally no one won a bet on the question posted:

OK, so by FanDuel’s rules, maybe they technically didn’t do anything wrong (more on that in a bit, because even that isn’t crystal clear). Even if you think FanDuel followed its house rules, the whole market for first TD scorer is silly because this means there was literally no way to win this bet. I’ll credit longtime bookmaker Rex Beyers for putting it succinctly:

But why are we even doing this? To make some more money? To limit liability on some crazy parlays that involve returners? To stop paying two winning bets on the same market, as one trader suggests? Whatever it is, I can’t imagine the juice is worth the squeeze. The main thing you are accomplishing is pissing off users and putting some tarnish on your brand for very little revenue or some limiting of exposure. (DraftKings and BetMGM are still in business and offer “defense/special teams” together as a bet you can place.) There are other ways around this, like voiding the bets if there is no winner or just paying the next score.

I loathe giving offshore sportsbooks credit for anything, but it’s at least possible to place a winning bet on similar markets at most of the biggest offshore sportsbooks. Offshore, you can bet “the field” (ie any unlisted player). If you know me, how bad is it when I have to say offshore is doing it right?

One more footnote:

“Special teams” isn’t defined in the FanDuel house rules. Most football fans probably put field goal attempts and punts in that category. However, it was also a defensive down for the Cowboys, unlike kickoffs, which are not a down; there is a kicking side and a returning side, and not a traditional “defensive side.” A team can also obviously line up for a punt or a field goal as a fake and try to run a play. Is all of that still “special teams” or is the team without the ball just the defense?

Anyway, I am not sure it’s entirely clear that Dallas defense bets should have been graded a loser without more specific house rules capturing what “special teams” means. I would be curious to hear what regulators think about the rule and/or the grading of these bets.

I leave everyone, and FanDuel, with this: Please at least be as good as the offshore sportsbooks when offering betting markets, and please don’t be worse.

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