Excellent narrative of the protean rise of DFS with just the right amount of personal story.

Great book! Brings to life the characters that most DFS players will be familiar with. Well balanced in its views of the great and bad things about DFS as the writer lives the dreams and the lows. Really well written, burned through it in no time

DUELING WITH KINGS is the first book written by this longtime sports and news journalist, Daniel Barbarisi. Subtitled "High Stakes, Killer Sharks, and the Get-Rich Promise of Daily Fantasy Sports," this text relays his investigative work and attempts to master Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS). As one of my colleagues commented, "it's all about the money; so appropriate to have Ben Franklin on the cover." Barbarisi concentrates on events of 2015 and 2016, relaying the controversies and massive ad campaigns associated with DraftKings and FanDuel. Increased visibility led to concerns about rigged games and legal challenges, especially in New York and Barbarisi interviews key players. He also chronicles his own efforts and adventures with the "sport," introducing readers to other players with names like Oreo, Underjones, and Beep. DUELING WITH KINGS was recently reviewed in The Wall Street Journal ("How to Swim with the Daily Fantasy Sharks") and is well-written, sharing statistics like this: 1.3% of DFS players took in 91% of the winnings in the first half of the 2015 baseball season.

Live link in post:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-become-an-overnight-daily-fantasy-shark-1488560519

DUELING WITH KINGS by Daniel Barbarisi provides in-depth insight into the world of DFS, Daily Fantasy Sports, through Barbarisi's detailed research of the history of DFS and at the same time telling his story of becoming a full time "professional" DFS player.
The story in infectious; a man bored with his job as a sports journalist stumbles upon a world he never knew of, DFS. He starts cautiously and carefully, researching the history of it and interviewing people involved with DFS, but like a kid whose discovered a new video game, he eventually can't help himself and almost recklessly jumps in with both feet and almost immediately it becomes part of who is he and what he thinks about daily. Seeing this as a form of gambling, Barbarisi does stop to look inward several times to consider the ramifications of being a gambling addict and whether he is one or will become one. All the while, he is giving us a sorted history of DFS and how the governmental opinion and legal status of the DFS is still evolving and changing. I immediately found myself cheering for Barbarisi and wanting to get to know as many of the characters of DFS as possible, from his teachers, to his fellow competitors, to the DFS gurus who now educate more than play, to his wife, who happily helped him and put up with her former journalist/current fulltime DFS player of a husband through all of his succesSes and failures along the way. The climax of the book, where Barbarisi is trying to win a major DFS tournament, was great; I found myself reading fasting and harder towards the end and even audibly reacting a couple of times.
A entertaining book written in a style that anyone can understand and connect to. While I'm not a big hockey fan and that was Barbarisi's sport of choice in the world of DFS, he gave me enough that I understood and followed all of his ups and downs. If you've every played fantasy sports, and most of us in the United States have by now, you will enjoy DUELING WITH KINGS.