A punter’s day at DraftKings at The Brook

Edward Abbey, the uncompromising voice of the Arizona outback, had a definite opinion on strong emotions and the perils of self-entertainment: “Despair leads to boredom, electronic games, computer hacking, poetry and other bad habits.”

I’m standing on the floor of the new DraftKings at The Brook in Seabrook on National Football League Sunday Week 2, counting the sportsbook gambling options. Seasoned gamblers thrive on “action” and “juice,” which describe how many and what kinds of bets are offered and the flow of a race meet or sports season.

Monitors are ubiquitous. It’s an in-your-face bombardment offering four thoroughbred racetracks, a harness track, two dog tracks, 10 NFL games, Keno, video roulette and an adjacent live poker room.

Three days earlier, I found 142 other fixedodds wagering possibilities on the DraftKings website, including Premier League Darts, Swedish handball and Russian Grand Prix auto racing.

The juice is everywhere and nowhere. Humorist Dave Barry once wrote that the mental energy focused on picking the winner of the next race at the track was equivalent to the calculations behind the Manhattan Project. I sense the whizzing of slide rules and the dancing of lucky troll dolls.

There is no focal point for the action at DraftKings. The masked crowd isn’t cheering in unison for the Red Sox or Patriots. There are random outbursts: “I’m betting it all on the Indians” or “He was freaking out about Green Bay,” but many of the gambling cubicles are solitary, their occupants monk-like.

No visible strong emotions here. Covid accounts for only part of this distancing.

“Live Free & Play” is DraftKings’ and partner New Hampshire Lottery’s tagline. It all depends on how it’s defined.

I expected a younger crowd, but DraftKings at The Brook, which opened on Aug. 12, is a facility still in the making. The sawed-off birches outside the main doors say forced Robert Frost art deco. The 200 punters here are my peeps from Rockingham Park or Churchill Downs. My wife, Lorrie, points out a table of four women playing Cajun Stud poker, and the feminine oasis stands out. To the best of her handicapping, there are two women younger than 30 in the entire place.

Eureka’s entrance

Sportsbook wagering at The Brook is nothing new to the Granite State.

New Hampshire opened Rockingham Park to parimutuel betting in 1933, the first state in New England to do so, and was the first state in the U.S. to have a lottery. Governor Sununu placed the first fixed-odds cellphone bet last Dec. 30, putting a modern twist to an old game.

The Nevada-based Eureka Casino Resorts acquired and rebranded The Brook in 2019, and New Hampshire has entered into a sixyear contract with DraftKings, which Sununu expects to deliver $7.5 million to the state in 2020 and $13.5 million by 2022.

Boston-based DraftKings is a Wall Street wunderkind as their major product; national daily fantasy contests are new. Their meteoric rise is not because of geezers like me betting $10 on the Jets over Miami. The shifting legal bedrock of fan interest rests on the definitions of “fantasy gaming” versus “gambling.”

No one can blame DraftKings and their chief competitor FanDuel for entering into the legal breach created by the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006.

The law’s intent was to put the squeeze on offshore gambling websites and prevent credit card companies from essentially acting as bagmen in the money flow to and from Curacao or the Bahamas. Fantasy gaming was excluded.

DraftKings Director of Race and Sportsbook Operations Johnny Avello explained it to me: “Fantasy sports have legally been deemed games of skill, not games of chance.”

Money is changing hands in fantasy gaming, but it’s not legally gambling. Welcome to the age of cognitive dissonance. Avello declined to reveal DraftKings’ takeout, or “vig,” which goes to the house on traditional sportsbook wagers as well as fantasy pools, citing company policy. At a racetrack, it’s typically about 18%.

To put that into perspective, since Jan. 1, DraftKings has handled over $100 million by phone, online and in person at its Seabrook and Manchester locations.

Monetary rewards

Rotisserie league football and baseball with friends and family was in its infancy in 2006 and hasn’t changed substantially since. For a NFL fantasy league, 10 or so fans gather on “Draft Day” before the season starts and make virtual draft choices of individual offensive players from different teams, limited by a fictitious salary cap. Under a cap of a mythical $50,000, one can choose All-Star Patrick Mahomes for quarterback, but with him costing $15,000 in make-believe money, a contestant then has to aim lower with the remaining $35,000. A fantasy team also needs running backs, wide receivers, a tight end and a place-kicker. Weekly results for touchdowns, field goals, passes completed and yards gained are logged with much of it on the honor system. The cap assures a level playing field, at least until the games start. Everybody knows everybody else. There is a one-time buy-in bet, and players might take turns, pre-Covid, hosting weekly parties. Potential winnings are essentially eaten up in Doritos and popcorn. When a winner for the season is crowned after the Super Bowl, it’s more about bragging rights than financial gain.

DraftKings and FanDuel have taken this same Sunday template, put more fans in the stands and expanded the menu to daily fantasy contests. A contestant no longer competes against friends and relatives. The scope is national, the monetary rewards higher and the risk of getting sucked down into the belly of the gaming beast greater. Players don’t have to wait until the end of a sports season for results; they only have to wait until the end of the day. DraftKings fantasy contests start with a $5 entry fee and top out at $1,000, with the state of New Hampshire getting a percentage of every entry fee. It’s not unusual for a player to test his or her team in multiple contests at the same time. The monetary prizes are commensurate with the entry fees and can be life-changing at the higher brackets.

On a program board tucked into an alcove of The Brook, and almost the color of Fenway Park’s green monster, is the daily fantasy contest schedule. This is where DraftKings earns its name, and it is the logical conclusion to a generation brought up with eyeballs and thumbs attached to cellphones. The tote is lightly attended today, but the future is here and I suspect the intensely engaged younger audience I’m looking for is couch- or cubiclebound at home away from the buzz of the betting floor.

“Would you like some help?” an attendant politely asks.

“It feels like I’m looking at the rotating train schedules in Grand Central Station and don’t know where I’m going,” I reply. “I’m beyond help.”

Small-time gamers can, of course, win and often do, but to convert one’s game to the skill level, the spirit of the law requires the study of national weather reports for game day, poring over team injury stats down to minor complaints, and giving up grocery shopping. Some players do.

A 2015 ESPN study found that 1.3% of the players win 91% of the money. To the studious and the lucky go the brass rings. As one horseplayer told national racing writer Andy Beyer years ago, “Son, if I’d spent as much time studying law books as I did the Daily Racing Form, I’d be on the Supreme Court.”

Odd pairing

The point where gaming becomes gambling is fuzzy, or maybe not. One DraftKings commercial states, “We also play for this: the big check,” and profiles a fantasy winner exulting in a cloudburst of paper money. “Making it rain” is a gambling term for a big score.

A 2016 “Frontline” episode titled “The Fantasy Sports Gamble” profiled a college student who entered 400 to 500 contests a day, so he claimed, with thousands of dollars at stake. He also claimed to have made a $200,000 profit by “investing” (his term) over two years. FanDuel told him to drop the word “gambling” from any interviews.

DraftKings and FanDuel are an odd pairing with professional sports’ endorsements.

The NFL and Major League Baseball have historically come down hard on athletes affiliated in any way with gambling. Shoeless Joe Jackson, portrayed sympathetically in the 1989 movie “Field of Dreams,” and perhaps the greatest hitter who ever lived, was banned from baseball for life a century ago on the mere suspicion he’d conspired with teammates to fix the 1919 World Series. It didn’t matter that he’d been acquitted in a courtroom.

DraftKings acknowledges play can become problematic for some and appointed Christina Thurmond in February as the director of responsible gaming. The position is linked to the National Council on Problem Gambling. Thurmond spent 20 years working at Harvard Medical School and was on the team that created the Massachusetts Division on Addiction.

Ed Talbot, director of the New Hampshire Council on Problem Gambling, is surprisingly optimistic. According to him, his office has not seen a recent rise in gambling addiction, calls to the helpline are down and people have more online resources to address a problem.

“The New Hampshire Lottery has always encouraged responsible play and has been a tremendous partner with us for seven years,” Talbot said. “Funding was approximately $25,000 annually along with in-kind support for our efforts.”

“Of note,” Talbot — an admitted recovering compulsive gambler — continued, “sports betting legislation created a Division of Sports Wagering within the New Hampshire Lottery to oversee sports betting, and the legislation prohibits wagering on any New Hampshire college teams or any college games taking place within the Granite State.”

The NHCPG has both a website and a 24- hour helpline at 603-224-1605. New Hampshire currently has one in-person Gamblers Anonymous meeting in Hampstead on Monday nights with about 15 regulars. A Manchester meeting has been put on hold due to Covid.

Lorrie and I exit DraftKings at The Brook and take in the fresh air. Electronic games are behind us for the day. We decide hugging a sawed-off birch is better than risking no poetry at all.