On the last day before Congress adjourned for the 2006 elections, legislators hastily passed an amendment to a port-security bill, one that never was debated and that few lawmakers had read or understood. Called the “Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act,” the tacked-on amendment effectively shut off U.S. customers’ access to online poker sites. Hundreds of thousands of poker players lost tens of millions of dollars as many of the leading poker sites shut down. Nearly a decade later, it turns out that the key portion of the UIGEA may not have been the outlawing of online poker but an obscure and seemingly harmless provision that exempted one form of online gambling from the new prohibitions: “fantasy sports” betting. Leaders of the major professional sports leagues took time out of their busy schedules opposing Internet wagering on the results of their games to lobby for the exemption of fantasy gambling, in which results are dependent on individual players’ statistics, not the outcomes of the games. The leagues supported (and actually may have written) the fantasy exemption, claiming that it simply was a way of building interest in their games and somehow did not constitute actual gambling – a curious position. “I’ve been in this business all my life,” John Avello, director of the sports book at Wynn Las Vegas, told The New York Times last week. “And when you put up money on an event and you get a return on whatever the outcome of that event … to me, that is gambling. There’s money changing hands.” Have you turned on a television lately? If so, you have been inundated by the fruit of that peculiar legislation: an advertising blitz by the two leading fantasy-betting companies, DraftKings and FanDuel. They spent a reported $27 million during the opening week of the National Football League season alone, recruiting hundreds of thousands of new customers to bet on daily and weekly fantasy games. The two companies now are valued at more than $1 billion each, good news for early investors – a group that includes Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League. The NFL itself still takes the laughable position that it opposes gambling on its games, but at least two of its major team owners – Jerry Jones (Dallas Cowboys) and Robert Kraft (New England Patriots) – were ground-floor investors. Absolutely no one regulates fantasy gambling, which is incredible when you consider the plethora of agencies and approvals necessary to conduct horse racing. That lack of regulation finally caught up to them this week, when it was revealed that a DraftKings employee had won $350,000 at FanDuel after allegedly having access to crucial insider data the public did not have – knowledge of which players were covered in how many fantasy lineups. It was the equivalent of knowing which superfecta combinations or lottery numbers were covered and which uncovered ones would allow someone to scoop the pool. So, now the House Energy and Commerce Committee and House Judiciary Committee have scheduled hearings on fantasy sports, and the New York state attorney general has launched an investigation and subpoenaed company records. The sports website Deadspin has dubbed the two companies “ScamDuel” and “GriftKings.” Yet the handle and the advertisements continue to flow, and thanks to fantasy gambling, the NFL is enjoying record ratings. Imagine that: A sport enjoys increasing popularity by telling people that they can bet on it. Imagine if there were a sport that had legal gambling built into it. Oh, wait. That would be horse racing. If there is anything in all of this for racing to learn, it is that there is an incredible public appetite for wagering, one that racing has failed to serve. For nearly a decade since the UIGEA stranded poker players and gave racing a virtual monopoly on online gambling, the sport failed to promote itself as a completely legal form of online gambling. Racing was too polite and dignified to advertise the gambling aspect, choosing instead the failed strategy of selling pageantry and backyard pony rides. Racing offers a better game than DraftKings or your local state lottery. It’s long past time to advertise that message to the fantastically gambling-happy American public.