Fantasy sports sites sue to keep doors open in NY

By Liana B. Baker NEW YORK, Nov 13 (Reuters) - Top daily fantasy sports companies DraftKings and FanDuel filed lawsuits on Friday to contest an order to shut down their online gaming operations in New York state, asking a state court to rule that the games are not illegal gambling. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman earlier this week ordered the two companies to stop taking money from New Yorkers and declared the games to be against the law. DraftKings said in its lawsuit that Schneiderman was "using strong-arm tactics and defying the rule of law," accusing the state attorney general of acting as judge, jury and executioner of the companies. Being forced to shut down in the state could be a crippling blow for the the fast-growing, multibillion-dollar industry, as New York has more daily fantasy sports players than any other U.S. state, according to Eilers Research. Earlier in the day, around a hundred protesters - a significant number of whom work for daily fantasy sports sites - gathered outside Schneiderman's office to protest his decision. Jason Green, 35, visiting from Nashville for a daily fantasy sports conference being held this weekend, came to the protest after reading the cease and desist letters to the companies from Schneiderman's office. "Regulation is one thing, but this isn't regulation - just one guy making a decision," he said. "There's a lot of misinformation out there and hopefully we've shown that people should be allowed to keep playing." Green works at a video game company and enters up to twenty hockey lineups per night, spending a few hundred dollars a week on the games. Modern fantasy sports started in 1980 and have mushroomed online with participants typically creating teams that span an entire season, in major professional sports including American football, baseball, basketball and hockey. Daily fantasy sports, a turbocharged version of the season-long game, has developed over the past ten years. In the new games, players draft teams in games played in just one evening or over the course of a weekend. The companies may have painted big targets on their backs through aggressive advertising at the start of the National Football League season that promised large winnings to participants. FanDuel has said it planned to pay out $2 billion in cash prizes this year. "They got very big, very fast," Schneiderman said on Thursday at an event, saying New York won't be the first or last state to make daily fantasy sports illegal. "New York state regulators and regulators in a lot of other states weren't paying attention." (Additional reporting by Diane Bartz in Washington and Suzanne Barlyn in New York, Writing by Michael Erman, editing by G Crosse)