Gone are the days of passively watching your favourite sports teams. Fantasy sport platforms have revolutionised the way people engage with sports, and thanks to tournaments such as the IPL, they are becoming hugely popular in India. Marketed as a way for sports fans to meaningfully engage with their favourite sports, fantasy sport platforms have seen a rapid growth to over 100 million users and is expected to grow further.
However, the legality of betting on fantasy sports is a highly contested topic, intertwined with India’s often unclear gambling laws. However, a recent case has established the betting on fantasy sports to be legal and we will cover this in the article.
What Games can be Played for Money Currently in India?
Currently there are many games that are available online that can be played for money. These are broken down into three key areas of Real Money Games, such as online Poker, mobile centric games such as Candy Crush, and e-Sports such as FIFA and Counterstrike. These games manage to navigate and circumvent the vague laws that try to ban playing online games for money.
You will find many games in India are largely classed as being a game of chance or a game of skill. This distinction goes on to decide largely whether it is legal to bet on them or not. The ruling of where fantasy sports like in this distinction has been contested recently, with a growing body of academicians considering fantasy sports to be skill dominant. However, do the courts agree with this decision? Before we dive into this, here is a brief outline on how fantasy sports work.
How do Fantasy Sports Work?
Fantasy sports are a type of online sports gaming where sports fans can create their own virtual teams for popular sports such as football, cricket, basketball, and kabaddi, based on real-life players. As scheduled matches and games play out in real-life, the virtual players in a fantasy team earn points based off their real-life counterparts.
Many fantasy sports platforms offer a dual model where sports fans can either ‘play for free’ or ‘pay to play’. The former model allows users to play competitions for free. While it is common for these competitions to have no monetary prize, some of them do. Whereas the latter model requires an entry fee where the top prize is a monetary reward consisting of the total pool of entry fees at the end of the competition.
How Much do Fantasy Sports General Annually?
The Indian online gaming market has soared in recent years which can be attributed to several factors. Specifically, the growth of the fantasy sports market can also be recognised through other key reasons. A few to important aspects are the development of sports leagues such as the Indian Super League and the Hockey India League, legitimate partnerships between these sports leagues and fantasy sports platforms, and general growth of digital usage in India. The surge of reasonably priced smartphones, fast internet, and cheaper data plans, all contribute to this.
Due to these factors, in the last five years the number of people who game has increased from two million to over a hundred million. This increase is also mirrored in the revenue of the fantasy sports platforms, where it has risen from Rs 920+ crore in 2019 and is expected to generate Rs 11,880+ crore in 2023.
The Question of Skill or Chance?
Whether a game to win money is justified as skill-based or chance-based is imperative to finding out the legality of it. Within India’s ruling, games of chance, whereby the outcome of the game is heavily influenced by a random result, are treated as illegal. Games of skill on the other hand, where the outcome is predominantly determined through a player’s mental skill, are mostly considered legal.
In which category fantasy sports can be classified, either as a game or skill, has been hotly contested. However, on the 4th of August, the Supreme Court of India dismissed an appeal against a decision of the Rajasthan High Court, deeming that the online fantasy game popular for cricket betting, Dream 11, involves skill and is not gambling. This decision was instrumental in spreading the awareness regarding the legality of fantasy sports, ultimately encouraging more sports fans to participate.
The decision of the Supreme Court has also been supported by academic institutions such as the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore. They conducted studies to prove that fantasy sports are games of skill due to the input from the users of the fantasy sports platforms.
What Does this Hold for the Future of Sports Betting?
While there are many similarities between sports betting and fantasy sports platforms, the former remains illegal in India. Despite this, there is still a market for sports betting, albeit unregulated. Many are calling for the regulation of this market which would allow revenue to be generated by taxing the earnings of Indian bookies.
However, impacts such as corruption in sports, tracking the flow of money, and promoting potentially addicting habits for some individuals, all still plague the future for regulated sports betting.
