[Lex Luthor]

Originally Posted by duncan_idaho

Yeah, I wasn't privy to the story, just heard it second-hand. I still talk to Rick a bit on Twitter. I know he wasn't doing anything other than what he thought was best. Think things just got heated because people disagreed with money on the line.

Daily fantasy is a gigantic scam, guys. Don't do it.

Putting money into daily fantasy is like sitting down to play Texas Hold Em with pros (and in many cases, you're going against the same guys).

I WAS privy to the story, and I can tell you EXACTLY what happened.

I was one of the members of the group you referred to. We all threw in $100 to bet on FanDuel in their million dollar contest. Hootie had a good idea with a strategy that actually sounded sort of interesting, so we decided to give it a try. There was a total of 50 of us in the group (including Hootie), so the total betting pool was $5000. The idea was to have a few fantasy football gurus take the pot and make hundreds of lineups, with the hope that one of the lineups would hit it big. We were basically going to imitate the strategies that the pros use to win at DFS.

We all knew there was a high probabiity that we would wind up losing all of the money. Eventually we did.

Losing the money wasn't the issue. Hootie got banned because:

1. He decided that the rules we all agreed to as a group did not apply to him.
2. After a few weeks, he announced that he was going to violate the most important rule of the group. He was going to submit some lineups on his own that matched lineups submitted by the group. If one of those lineups happened to be a big winner, Hootie would have raked 50% off the top. He had some bullshit justification for doing it: He said Fanduel offered him some free entries into the contest, and that he had no way of knowing they would make him such a fabulous offer, and there was no way he wasn't going to take them up on it, blah blah blah blah blah. You know how Hootie is when starts filibustering.
3. Everyone said "Dude, you can't do that. This was your ****ing rule to begin with, and we all agreed to it. If you intentionally violate this rule, you will be kicked out." What that meant was that he would no longer be in charge of setting lineups or making any decisions.
4. At that point Hootie went full reerun. Anyone who is familiar with Hootie understands what that means. He's like the Terminator. He can't be reasoned with, he can't be bargained with, and he absolutely will not stop. When he was told that he'd be kicked out of the group if he did that, he told everyone to **** off , announced that he was quitting the group, and he accused the group of stealing HIS money.
5. If he had just left it there, it would have been fine. But he just couldn't do that. There was an agreement among everyone that we would leave Fanduel Forum business in that private forum. That's why the private Fanduel forum was created in the first place. But Hootie wasn't satisfied with melting down in the private forum. He felt the need to bring it into the Lounge. He started a thread in the Lounge and made a bunch of false accusations. I'm sure he didn't see it that way, but the fact is that he lied. He lied when he said everyone stole his money. He lied when he accused two moderators of being part of the conspiracy to steal his money.
6. The two moderators in the group decided they'd had enough of his shit, and Hootie was banned. It was as simple as that. In retrospect, it was totally predictable.

I was sorry that he got himself banned. I enjoyed reading his posts in this thread, and I enjoyed arguing with him.

The fact is that Hootie has been banned from this site many times before. He always comes crawling back with a promise that he'll behave better this time. It was inevitable that he would be banned again. If he hadn't been banned for this, he would have found some other way to get himself banned. That's what Hootie does.

I will say that I completely agree with your comment about DFS. It is a scam. One week the winner of the million dollar pool had just joined the site a couple of days prior to the pool, and had made a total of 5 entries. One of the entries came in first place, and the other came in third. I found it very hard to believe that the game was honest when I saw that. To me, the $100 was an interesting experiment, a cheap way to learn a lot about DFS, and a lesson about what a scam it truly is. I had opened up an account on DraftKings and was thinking about giving it a try. After I saw how the game truly works, I cancelled my account without ever placing a bet.