New York’s fantasy-sports gamers are on the offense — and they’ll be storming straight to state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office for a protest rally Friday morning.
“We want the AG to know that there’s over a million daily fantasy players in New York, and hundreds of us are going to be there” outside Schneiderman’s lower Manhattan offices, said Brit Devine, an upstate gamer who says he makes $100,000 a year on fantasy sports.
“We want to ask him, ‘Why are you doing this?’ ” Devine said of the 8 a.m. rally, slated for between Pine and Cedar streets. “Why do you want to take away the fun that a million New Yorkers enjoy?”
Schneiderman, meanwhile, has been on defense since his Tuesday cease-and-desist letter to the nation’s two biggest online fantasy-sports-betting Web sites, FanDuel and DraftKings.
The AG was at a Manhattan luncheon Thursday afternoon where he was shown a copy of The Post with a photo illustration depicting him being sacked by Calvin Pryor of the Jets and a Buffalo Bills player. He laughed awkwardly and said, “I’ve certainly never had that good a spot in a football game.”
“Colorful graphics,” the AG noted before repeatedly telling guests at the event that “I’m just doing my job” in trying to ban the gaming, which he believes is illegal gambling.
The AG also retweeted a message from his chief of staff, Micah Lasher, decrying the “disgusting epithets” angry fantasy-sports fans have been posting online.
Some of the quickly removed blasts to @AGSchneiderman used ethnic slurs and made anatomically implausible sex suggestions.
Watch this video to see online reaction to the DraftKings and FanDuel ban:
Meanwhile, officials at FanDuel and DraftKings said Thursday that they are readying legal action — presumably injunctions seeking court orders to compel the AG to hold off on next Tuesday’s cease-and-desist deadline.
“What the attorney general has done is irresponsible, irrational and illegal,” said DraftKings lawyer Randy Mastro.
Additional reporting by Amber Sutherlandand Sophia Rosenberg