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Gambling911.com intrepid reporter Thomas Somach reports that Daily Fantasy Sports site MaximumFantasySports.com will be offering Fantasy action on the Super Bowl. While contests are illegal, pools are not. Here’s Somach…
Gambling 911 recently reported how fantasy sports leagues won't be offering contests for the Super Bowl, because the Federal law that permits fantasy sports wagering stipulates it must be based on multiple games, and the Super Bowl is just one game, thus ineligible for fantasy.
What will be the biggest day of the year for Las Vegas sportsbooks, online sports betting sites and illegal bookmakers across America--Super Bowl Sunday on February 1--will be a day off for fantasy sports leagues.
At least most of them.
One popular fantasy sports league, Maximum Fantasy Sports in Chicago, isn't taking the Super Bowl ban lying down.
Eager to satisfy its customer base, which lusts for Super Bowl action, Maximum has come up with a way for its players to still have a monetary stake in the Big Game, all the while remaining totally legal.
"We are providing squares' pools," Bill Parsons, co-founder of Maximum Fantasy Sports, told Gambling 911 today in an exclusive interview. "These pools are highly popular for the Super Bowl.
"Members can create their own pools and we will take care of generating the grids, providing the scoring and highlighting the winners," Parsons continued. "There are a few different configuration options on how winners are determined. There is the score, using the last digit only. There is the reverse of the score. There is touching the square of each score, and so on.
"The configuration also determines if a person holds the same numbers throughout the game or if we randomize and assign numbers for each quarter. Of course, because of the wording of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, we cannot collect and distribute funds. Each pool takes responsibility for these tasks."
Maximum's squares' pools are based on the ubiquitous Super Bowl pools that flood offices and factories in the days before the game.
The pools typically work like this: a grid of 100 squares, 10 by 10, is drawn on a sheet of paper, with two random digits assigned to each square.
The digits represent the last digit of each teams' final score.
Participants selects squares, either blindly or by choosing particular digits, and pony up a fee.
If the final score of the Super Bowl is, say, New England 27, Seattle 14, then the person who bought the square with the digits 7 and 4 wins the pool.
By Tom Somach
Gambling 911 Staff Writer
