Daily fantasy sports site FantasyDraft announced that it would be paying out some of the money owed to the players of the now defunct Fantasy Aces after it filed for bankruptcy.
The quick backstory on Aces and DFS bailouts
The bankruptcy filing showed that Aces owed about $1.3 million in player balances.
FantasyDraft had been in talks to acquire Aces; they later called off the deal.
It’s the third bailout out of a defunct DFS operator this year, on the heels of both Fantasy Hub and FantasyUp disappearing while owing funds to players.
The announcement from FantasyDraft
FantasyDraft CEO Steve Krombolz released a statement late on Monday night. In that statement, the DFS operator made its intention known to make the vast majority of former Aces players whole.
In the announcement, FD said it had “entered into an agreement with the FantasyAces bankruptcy trustee to obtain player account and balance information in order to help reimburse missing FantasyAces player funds.”
Here are the logistics of the agreement:
Through this agreement, we have committed to reimburse Fantasy Aces players up to $1,000 cash to cover missing account balances, this makes 99.6% of the players whole. In addition, to help those with larger balances we are also going to offer the following:
- Players with a Fantasy Aces cash account balance between $1,000 – $5,000:
- We will provide $1,000 Cash + Remaining balance in FantasyCash up to $4,000 ($5,000 total)
- Players with a Fantasy Aces cash balance >$5,000:
- We will provide $1,000 Cash + $4,000 FantasyCash + a Pending Bonus for the remainder of your balance
- Pending Bonus is earned at a rate of 4% for each $1 in entry fees paid in USD, and is paid as FantasyCash
All of this is pending approval of the trustee. The full amount of FantasyDraft’s financial commitment is unknown.
Anecdotally, Aces owes a number of players five figures. And given the relatively low number of users at Aces, even the amount covered by FantasyDraft falls well short of the $1.3 million owed to players.
The latest from Fantasy Aces
There has been little of note on the Aces front since it announced its bankruptcy.
Here’s the message that now greets visitors to the website:
The FantasyAces team truly regrets to announce that we are unable to sustain our site and business operations effective January 31st 2017, filing for protection under Chapter 7 bankruptcy law.
After spending over a year attempting to secure long term capital, including recent negotiations with two notable companies which subsequently failed to close, we are left with an unresolvable financial burden and have spent every waking minute attempting to find a solution for our players most importantly. We have unfortunately exhausted every possible financial option with no success.
We fought as hard as we could, in the end without a major infusion or acquisition we just were not able to make it. Our site is temporarily shuttered and all accounts are on hold during this time while we work with the bankruptcy court in finding the fastest possible solution for our players.
Aces said “spent every waking minute attempting to find a solution for our players. However, Legal Sports Report confirmed with multiple sources that Aces was behind six figures in player balances dating back to 2015.
