Bachelor Contestant Probed in $1 Million DFS Win

DraftKings is investigating former Bachelor contestant Jade Roper after the season 19 star took home the $1 million winning prize in the company’s Fantasy Football Millionaire contest last weekend.

Roper’s husband, Tanner Tolbert, also a contestant on the season 2 of the spinoff Bachelor in Paradise, is a well-known DFS player and after his wife’s win, other DFS pros took to Twitter to analyze potential collusion between the two to gain an advantage on the remainder of the field in this past weekend’s contest.

The issue that DraftKings is reviewing is whether or not the husband-wife duo set their lineups jointly to prevent overlap, a strategy that could potentially violate the company’s policy of creating an unfair advantage and cost the Bachelor star $1 million in winnings.

After Twitter exploded Sunday evening with accusations of collusion, DraftKings made a statement on Monday declaring that they would look into whether the couple is guilty of collusion.

“We take the integrity and fairness of our contests very seriously,” the company wrote in Monday’s statement. “The DraftKings compliance team reviews the results of all major contests to ensure they comply with our Terms of Use and applicable state regulations. We take the integrity and fairness of our DFS contests seriously, and prizes are not paid out until our reviews are complete.”

source: actionnetwork.com

After professional DFS players began to wonder aloud if the couple cheated, William Bierman, a 30-year old professional player, began to investigate the lineups of Roper and Tolbert.

Bierman went to RotoGrinders, a DFS website that provides a search engine for contestants’ lineups. He first searched Tolbert’s lineups and then moved over to Roper’s. What he found, in his mind, was clear collusion.

“I saw it immediately,” Bierman told the gambling website, The Action Network. “One of them took Saturday’s quarterbacks, the other took Sunday’s quarterbacks. They both faded the most popular wide receiver Michael Thomas and both didn’t use Brady. And, even though this is their first win, they’ve done this before where one takes the maximum entries on one quarterback and the other takes the maximum entries on another.”

source: actionnetwork.com

Both Roper and Tolbert entered 150 lineups, the maximum number of entries DraftKings allows into the contest. Bierman found that the couple rarely used the same quarterback in their entries, an odd coincidence considering that only eight quarterbacks played in the wild card round of the NFL playoffs.

Bierman, a winner of last week’s DraftKings Super Pool, told the website that he had never seen blatant collusion like this in his five years of playing professionally.

When Will DraftKings Make Their Final Decision?

After three days of investigating, DraftKings has yet to reach a verdict in the case and, as a result, Roper has not received any of the $1 million dollar prize.

The couple has only released one statement since Roper’s win, claiming, in an email to ESPN, that the victory was nothing more than pure luck and that they were confident that DraftKings would come to the same findings.

DraftKings CEO Jason Robins has stated that the company is working quickly to come to a resolution.