DraftKings downplays major Week 1 overlay, launches new fantasy stats app

The CEO of daily fantasy sports operator DraftKings is once again musing publicly about a merger with archrival FanDuel.

On Monday, DraftKings CEO Jason Robins visited the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, confirming that his company continues to discuss the possibility of a union with FanDuel, although he qualified that the talks were “on and off” and no such deal was imminent.

Robins used his TechCrunch appearance to debut a new technical tool for users to track their fantasy activity. The DK Live app (currently available only for iOS) is a real-time NFL news aggregator that displays stats on all league players as well as costuming the feed to focus on players on your DraftKings roster. An Android version is in the pipeline and DraftKings plans to add other sports to the app in due course.

This weekend marked the return of NFL DFS action, and DraftKings’ marquee NFL guarantee prize pool fell well short of filling. The site dropped the entry fee for its $5m Millionaire Maker to a player-friendly $3, but the site ended up having to cover a significant overlay. The site plans to reinstate the marquee contest’s $20 entry fee for Week 2.