DraftKings is offering a $10 million contest for the opening week of NFL season, by the far the biggest contest ever held in the history of daily fantasy sports.
The first eight-figure contest
DraftKings announced its initial NFL contests on Friday, with the big news coming in the form of the $10 million guaranteed contest. Here are the details:
- $2 million to first place
- $1 million to second place
- 572,500 entries
- Users can enter up to 500 times
- $20 entry fee
DraftKings teased to big things earlier this week, promising the “most guaranteed prizes ever seen in daily fantasy sports.”
The DFS site didn’t disappoint, guaranteeing more money in one contest than FanDuel did over all of its current events. FanDuel has over $8 million in NFL contest guarantees posted in its lobby.
Other contests at DraftKings
DraftKings has $11.3 million in guarantees across its first three contests, with more likely to come. The other contests:
- A $1 million contest with a $3 entry fee (383,300 entries).
- A $300,000 contest with a $5,300 entry fee (60 entries).
Over all three contests, DraftKings has a maximum of more than 950,000 entries, meaning DraftKings will likely have more than a million entries for Week 1 of the NFL season by the time everything is said and done. That’s assuming, of course, that DraftKings doesn’t experience any overlays.
DraftKings clearly No. 1 now?
We will have to wait to see how DraftKings does in filling all these contests, and the traffic it generates leading up to the start of the NFL season. Even if the contests don’t fill and DraftKings has to cover an overlay, it is banking on customer acquisition as the end game of running a contest this big.
For now, it seems increasingly likely that DraftKings has overtaken FanDuel for marketshare with the momentum it has built up over recent months. However, FanDuel said it would award $2 billion in prizes this year, while DraftKings said it expected to award $1 billion in prizes.
With its offerings in golf and by leveraging its partnership with Major League Baseball, it had already appeared that DraftKings may have ascended to the No. 1 position in DFS. With Friday’s announcement, there’s more reason to think that status will carry over to NFL season.
