Gambling

A prediction market settled a college football game before the game had actually ended, then took the money back. In the closing seconds of Western Michigan at Michigan on 5 September, Kalshi began paying out Western Michigan winning contracts at 10:52 p.m., before officials reviewed the final play and put one more second back on the clock. Michigan used that second for a 47-yard Hail Mary and won 13-12. The market had seen $18.6m in volume. Kalshi clawed back the payouts to Western Michigan holders and paid the correct side; on DraftKings, the same game was not fully settled until 11:17 p.m., after the final whistle. ...

The first full NFL season with prediction markets at scale has produced an advertising cycle that looks like the sportsbook land grab of the early 2020s, except that the money is now flowing through a channel the states do not supervise. Prediction market companies spent nearly $200m on digital advertising in the first seven months of 2026, according to the American Gaming Association, the trade body for regulated casinos and sportsbooks. The same trade group estimates that more than half of the digital sports betting ads consumers saw through July came from companies that were not subject to state rules on promotions and responsible-gambling messaging. ...

Half of the Premier League’s 20 clubs have sponsorship or advertising deals with gambling companies that are not licensed in the UK — up from six clubs over the summer, according to analysis reported by the Guardian. Those deals could be illegal next year under proposals the government is developing. An eight-week consultation on banning sponsorship from unlicensed operators closes on Wednesday, with licensed bookmakers such as Ladbrokes and William Hill on one side and the Premier League on the other. ...

This is a commentary piece. Dave Schilling’s argument in a Guardian opinion column is that the United States has stopped pretending to object to gambling in general and now objects only to the specific people who get caught — which is a description of enforcement by embarrassment, not regulation. Two cases from the past two weeks carry his argument. Santos and Simmons Kalshi banned former congressman George Santos from its platform for life. He had bet on himself not to attend the State of the Union address, and then did not attend. He won more than $17,000, which he must now return, and faces more than $80,000 in total fines from Kalshi and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Schilling’s summary of the offence: “the dumb person’s version of insider trading.” ...

In the first week of the 2024 US Open, Jiri Lehecka played on court four with a spectator seated directly behind his bench. The man talked at him for the first three sets. You can’t do it. You are tired. He’s better than you are. Lehecka won the match anyway. He also asked the chair umpire whether anything could be done, and the reply is the whole story: “Yeah, I can’t do anything as long as he’s not insulting you.” Lehecka’s view is that the man had money on him to lose, and that he had come to court four specifically to change the outcome. ...

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has spent years taking hardline positions against gambling. His office concluded that daily fantasy sports contests offered by DraftKings and FanDuel constituted illegal gambling under Texas law, a finding that produced years of litigation until the company dropped its suit against him. Texas remains one of fewer than a dozen states that prohibit online sports betting outright. He has stayed out of the campaign against prediction markets, where nearly every other Republican and Democratic attorney general has signed on. Politico reported on 3 September that Kalshi gave $5,000 to Paxton’s Lone Star Liberty PAC in May 2025, followed a month later by $7,000 from Kalshi co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour to Paxton’s Senate campaign — $12,000 in total, at a moment when Paxton is in a tight race against Democrat James Talarico. Neither the campaign nor the attorney general’s office commented on the report. The donations do not establish a quid pro quo, and the sum is small next to what Kalshi’s founders are spending elsewhere: Mansour and co-founder Luana Lopes Lara have put more than $1m into the 2026 cycle, weighted toward Republicans. ...

Prediction markets have found a growth category that does not depend on sports seasons or election cycles: the weather, and the climate itself. Kalshi announced a deal giving it access to data from the Weather Company — owner of the Weather Channel — to verify weather-related outcomes, and called weather “one of the fastest-growing and most crucial categories” on the platform. Monetized weather and climate predictions grew 500% over the past year into a $1.1bn market, and Kalshi’s markets will appear inside the Weather Channel’s app, which the company says reaches more than 330 million people worldwide. ...

Start with what a $14m market does to a reporter. In March, the Israeli journalist Emanuel Fabian reported that an Iranian missile had struck Beit Shemesh, confirmed by the military and by video of the explosion. Polymarket had $14m riding on whether Iran would strike Israel that day, and interceptor fragments did not count as a strike under the market’s terms. So strangers wrote to him — politely at first, then less so, then from Discord, X, and WhatsApp, and then through a colleague. Someone had already forged an email in his name saying the story would be corrected. Within days the messages were threats to him and his family: “After you make us lose $900,000 we will invest no less than that to finish you.” Another: “Believe me, you don’t want to be their target.” ...

A White House teleprompter operator who left his post amid accusations that he used inside knowledge to bet on Donald Trump’s speeches has been fined $172,000, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced. Gabriel Perez wagered on Kalshi about which words or phrases the president would use — a market whose outcomes he had advance access to through his job loading the speeches. The CFTC ordered him to give up $107,539.02 in profits and pay a $65,000 civil penalty, a total the agency described as “a substantial discount” granted for what it called his exemplary cooperation. He also agreed to cease and desist from further violations of market-manipulation law and accepted a three-year trading ban. ...

For most of the last century the official story about gambling harm was individual: some people can’t control themselves, the industry offers responsible-gambling tools, and everyone else is fine. In November 2024 The Lancet Public Health published a full Commission — an invited, multi-author review with recommendations — that rejects that framing and replaces it with the one public health has used for tobacco and alcohol. Gambling harms are produced by an industry, distributed unequally, and shaped by political and commercial decisions. The Commission’s stated aim is to “raise awareness of the public health risks associated with current trends in commercial gambling development” and to give international, national and regional actors a playbook. ...

Most arguments about legalized sports betting run on anecdotes. This paper runs on bank data. Scott Baker, Justin Balthrop, Mark Johnson, Jason Kotter and Kevin Pisciotta took transaction-level records from a financial aggregator covering 230,171 US households — roughly 4.9 million household-quarters — and exploited the staggered rollout of online sports betting across the 26 states that launched between August 2018 and September 2023. Because legalization dates were set by idiosyncratic legislative and court schedules, the timing gives them something close to a natural experiment. ...

In 1995 Jim Bell, an anarchist engineer who had studied at MIT and worked at Intel, serialized an essay called “Assassination Politics.” His design: a site where users anonymously nominate someone to be killed and pledge money toward the bounty, then pay a small fee to register an encrypted prediction — visible only to them and the site — of when the person will die. When the death is confirmed, the predictions are decrypted and the pot pays the winning predictor. The best way to be right about the date is to cause it. “If only 0.1% of the population… was willing to pay $1 to see some government slimeball dead,” Bell wrote, “that would be, in effect, a $250,000 bounty on his head.” ...