My Experience with FanDuel

Fantasy Football has come a long way in popularity, cultural relevance, and as a marketing capability since it's inception in 1963. Now, Fantasy Football is one of the primary marketing tools for the NFL.

With it's continued rise in mainstream relevance and marketing appeal, it was only a matter of time before the evolution to a daily fantasy league was bound to be created.

These days, it's nearly impossible to watch t.v. or listen to the radio without hearing an ad for Fan Duel or Draft Kings, the mainstream one-day leagues. As an avid (my wife might say "rabid") fantasy footballer, my curiosity has been piqued for the last couple of years. I finally decided that it was time to drop a few bucks into it and see what it was all about. The logic behind it was pretty simple; if I can drop a hundred on my money league, why not spend $10 on a one day league if for no other reason than to satisfy my curiosity?

Now, let us get the point of this particular blog entry straight; this is NOT a "what's fanduel/draft kings all about" blog post. There's hundreds, if not thousands, of those available for anyone's perusal, and I encourage anyone who's curious to go read them if they are interested in trying it out.

This blog post is to recount my experience with FanDuel and how it didn't start off so well. For the record, I chose FanDuel because it was the first one-day league that I had heard about, I don't want to turn this into a conversation about which is better or which came first. FanDuel was the first one I heard about it, so it's the one I chose to try out.

I signed up and deposited $10.00 into my account as part of a promotional package on another fantasy website. I strategically sat on it during the first two weeks of the season as a way to do some more homework on the players and teams. Wednesday before the third week of games started, I sat down and picked a $5 contest to participate in. I did some reading about how the contest was scored and then spent the next 45 minutes combing through the players, match-ups, and salary cap. I selected and re-selected my players and when I felt confident --a sign of alarm for any fantasy player --I accepted and entered the contest with my team.

The next morning, I downloaded the mobile app and logged in to look my team over one more time only to find no team, no contest, and my remaining $5 were not there. If I'm being completely honest here, a sense of panic was secondary. My initial reaction was that the whole thing was a rip-off and I didn't read the fine print. Which, I will admit, I did not. Then I panicked a little. Where the heck was my team? Where the heck was my money? Why the heck did I pick up a backup running back as a starter?!

I started a support ticket. Again, negativity bubbling up to the forefront of my mind, I figured that it would be two days before I heard back from anyone. The problem here, is that the Thursday night game was a mere 12 hours away!

I sent my support ticket at 6:32 A.M. on Thursday morning. At 7:45 A.M. on Thursday morning I had a response from a live person. I am Jack's wide-eyed surprise. Not only did I have a response, my issue had been resolved!

As it turns out, the fault was entirely mine. I had previously set up a FanDuel account, but have never used it. When I signed up and deposited money, it was a new account as I had long forgotten the one I never actually used. When I downloaded  the mobile app, I used the OLD account email and hence had zero dollars and zero contests going. As it turns out, having multiple accounts is against the end user license agreement that I had electronically agreed to and my accounts could have been deleted by site management. The gentleman informed me of this, and deleted my old, unused account and left my new account in good standing. I logged out of my now defunct account and back into my new one to find my $5 still there and my contest still active.

While it is extremely impressive to receive a helpful support ticket response in just over an hour, I am most impressed -- if not grateful -- that my account was left in good standing and not simply deleted for an unintentional violation of site policy.

I don't know if I will win this week or not, maybe I will update this later with the results of this weeks contest. But, I do know that I am very happy with FanDuel's customer support system.

If my bad-luck doesn't screw me out of my current happiness, FanDuel may have a new rabid-fantasy-player.

As always...the Hungry Writer Abides...