This week, Yahoo announced that it will host a pay-to-play daily fantasy sports contest entirely based on the Super Bowl, making Yahoo the latest daily fantasy sports operator to drop the historic view that DFS contests have to be based on multiple real-world sporting events.
While this view is legally questionable, it is almost certain that Yahoo and its payment processors will not face any legal challenge as their competitors, DraftKings and FanDuel, have been doing the same now for years. Nevertheless, by further blurring the line with traditional sports gambling, Yahoo perhaps hurts its interests in other ways—for example, by making it harder to claim that DFS companies should not have to pay the federal excise tax on wagers.
