Tribal Gaming Leaders Insist DK Replay Product In Oregon Is Slots, Not Sports

Is DK Replay, the game DraftKings launched in Oregon last week and described as “a brand-new way to bet on historical markets,” a form of sports betting or a form of an online casino game?

At the Indian Gaming Association’s annual conference in San Diego this week, the consensus opinion in the tribal gaming sphere has been made clear.

“What DraftKings is introducing in Oregon is a misnomer, calling it historical baseball,” said Scott Crowell of Crowell Law Office – Tribal Advocacy Group during a panel Monday afternoon titled “Prediction Markets: From Defense to Strategy.”

Crowell continued: “Taking stats from pitchers vs. batters over thousands of meetings — that’s not sports wagering at all, that’s a random number generator, also known as a slot machine.”

The game, housed in the DraftKings Sportbook app and available only in Oregon for now — a state where DraftKings has an online sports betting monopoly — does, as Crowell said, grade wins and losses based on the outcomes of actual pitches thrown in the past. But there appears to be some room for debate over whether that is, as Crowell said, akin to a random number generator (RNG).

In a statement sent to Sportico Monday, Oregon Lottery spokesperson Melanie Mesaros wrote, “DK Replay does not rely on a random number generator, which is the way casino-style games work.” Mesaros explained that, instead, the game “draws from a queue of hundreds of thousands of betting markets that have previously been offered on the DraftKings Sportsbook.”

DraftKings did not provide comment to Sportico.

Mesaros elaborated that the regulators feel the game “falls within what DraftKings is currently authorized to offer within our sports betting product.”

To date, eight states have legalized iCasino platforms, and Oregon is not one of them.

Historical figures

Victor Rocha, the outspoken IGA conference chair, expressed the same stance as Crowell during a panel Monday titled “Prediction Markets: The Redefinition of Gambling.”

“This is a product DraftKings is going to be able to use to get around gambling,” Rocha said, “but it’s Class II — it’s historical baseball.”

The word “historical” in gambling products has come to suggest an alternate form of RNGs, as in the case of both historical horse racing and Hard Rock Bet’s historical NASCAR game it has made available in Florida. Those “historical”-based games look and feel like slot machines, with the outcomes based on real sports results that may as well be randomly generated as far as the player is concerned.

DK Replay, whether one considers it sports betting or a casino game, does at least look more like a sports wager and less like a slot machine. The user is presented with an actual past baseball scenario, given some game context, and asked to bet whether the next pitch will be a ball, strike, or hit in-play.

Rocha believes that DraftKings is stretching the rules in Oregon based on its leverage via the state’s gambling compact, which decrees DK keeps just 49% of its revenue and gives 51% to the state as long as it has a monopoly, but would keep 85%-95% if Oregon allowed additional operators.

“DraftKings is taking advantage” of the situation, Rocha observed.