SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
It has been revealed that TriStar Pictures has acquired the film rights to produce the picture for the book The Big Game. 
The book itself is being written by Albert Chen and has not yet been released itself though it’s expected to hit the shelves next year via Houghton-Mifflin. Chen is a staff writer at Sports Illustrated and covers baseball, college football and the NFL. Its full working title is ‘The Big Game: Daily Fantasy And The High Stakes Battle For Fans, Fortune And Survival’.
Its focus is on the scandal which cast something of a shadow on the DFS industry’s two major players; DraftKings and FanDuel.
The book has been described as ‘The Big Short in the world of daily fantasy sports’. A recent ESPN investigative report highlighted the scandal and discussed in exceptional detail the rise and ‘fall’ of the two companies. You can read it in full here.
The film will essentially do the same and focus on some of the high flyers from this world and how it quickly turned into a billion dollar industry with ads, at its peak, on television every 90 seconds in the States.
It was back in autumn of 2015 that both DraftKings and FanDuel released statements following a big win by a DraftKings employee.
The statements both accepted that employees of both companies had won money playing on other DFS sites. With suspicions of foul play and the use of insider information running amok FanDuel made the decision “to temporarily restricting employees from participating in DFS contests as an interim measure while we work with the fantasy industry to develop and implement a more formal policy”.
With the amount of players that DFS still maintains and with the industry expanding at a respectable rate in Europe, the film will doubtless generate considerable interest. The hope is that it remains unbiased and fully explores both sides of the issues and story rather than turn into a witch hunt.
Chen was tasked with writing the book after Gotham pair Jeremy Ball and company CEO Ellen Goldsmith-Vein took the idea to an agent.
The film will be produced by both the Gotham Group and Appien Way, whilst Waxman Leavall will support Chen in completing the book.
