Billion Dollar Fantasy

APPLE BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH SELECTION “We devoured [this] engrossing account of the battle for supremacy between three fantasy gaming sites. … Chen flips the script with a character-driven narrative, exposing the people who fueled the industry (not necessarily the folks you’d expect) and what motivated them (not necessarily unadulterated greed). Gamers will find this book impossible to put down, as will anyone who loves a good origin story.”—Apple Books, Best of the Month selection

“Fans of financial thrillers such as Barbarians at the Gate will be excited by this insider account of the dizzying rise of fantasy sports websites”—Publishers Weekly

You’ve seen the commercials. Here is the untold story behind the clash of billion dollar companies that unleashed an unprecedented advertising war.

From Sports Illustrated’s Albert Chen comes the story of two companies whose battle unleashed a carpet bombing of advertising as they sought supremacy in an exploding fantasy sports and gambling market: In a time of gushing venture capital money, FanDuel and DraftKings turned into billion-dollar companies seemingly overnight — then, just as quickly, found themselves the target of FBI and Department of Justice investigations, and facing likely destruction. Chen tells the story of the improbable individuals behind the saga: An Irishman who knew nothing about American sports. A fantasy geek who felt it was his destiny to change the way fellow nerds watched the games they loved. A conflicted poker player. A mother of three in Scotland. In a character-driven narrative with excursions into the strange and unexpected, Chen takes us from casinos to board rooms, from Edinburgh to Wall Street to the Vegas Strip, to tell a sprawling and intimate tale of the new world that this group of accidental disruptors helped to create. It’s a story of ideas and dreams, about a world of risk, luck, hubris, greed and redemption—a story for our high-stakes times.

Author Biography

Albert Chen is a senior editor at Sports Illustrated. He’s written more than a dozen cover stories for SI. He has covered baseball, football, sports business, and gambling and written for Fortune and appeared on CNN, NPR, MLB Network, and ESPN Radio. Albert grew up in Hastings, Nebraska and Columbia, Maryland. He has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale University and is a three-time champion of the League of Ordinary Gentleman fantasy football league. He lives in New York City with his wife, Andrea, and son, Leo.