The Early Line: Prediction Markets Are All The Rage
TCL offers a roundup of recent US gambling news called The Early Line every Monday.
Gambling and prediction markets | With the election tomorrow, every other news item or social media post I see is about the odds at a prediction market (largely Kalshi and Polymarket). What I’ve seen lately: 1. Robinhood, the trading platform, is now in the prediction markets game as of last week. 2. Polymarket wants to dive into sports betting more seriously. 3. Kalshi is a top-10 app in the App Store leading up to Election Day. 4. North American sportsbooks are staying away, so far, outside of Ontario.
Reading the line: Where is it all headed? While it’s the topic du jour in America, that’s less certain. Despite how much Polymarket is cited in the US, it’s not serving US customers. Kalshi is coming off wins in court and is trying to build off its momentum in recent weeks as a legal US product. I am the most bullish on Robinhood; adding prediction markets makes tons of sense on a platform that already has a sustainable business model. For the others, the opportunity around presidential elections presents opportunities and challenges. For instance, they need to solve for what to do when people aren’t trading hundreds of millions on the election. I also have to wonder how long online gambling operators can be content to sit out, despite a history of policymakers wanting them to stay away from election betting. (Check out what happened in West Virginia years ago, for instance.)
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Election Day and sports betting | Gambling policy is certainly not the main event for Americans on Tuesday, but sports betting is on the ballot in Missouri. And a ballot measure in Colorado could impact sports betting taxes and revenue. If you’re looking ahead to next legislative season, gambling talk is already surfacing in Alabama.
Reading the line: Missouri remains the most likely place we’ll see online betting expansion in the next year. It will also put to the test how popular sports betting is vis a vis a survey from the American Gaming Association.ESPN and ESPN Bet now allow account linking | If you have both the ESPN and ESPN Bet apps, you can link accounts so that you can track your bets while still in the ESPN app. More from the Penn Entertainment press release here.
Reading the line: It’s not clear how much this will move the needle in helping ESPN Bet. It will undoubtedly help retention and getting folks to stay in the ESPN ecosystem. But right now the sportsbook is struggling just to get a critical mass of depositing and betting customers, and I don’t think account linking helps that. Meanwhile, Penn announces Q3 earnings this week while accounting for the underperformance of the ESPN Bet endeavor so far. More on start-of-football-season numbers at ESPN Bet here (paywalled).
Quick hitters
I took a top-line look at land-based casino revenue to see if online casino revenue is hurting it in Friday’s The Cashout.
Caesars expands its Horseshoe online casino to more jurisdictions.
Sports betting is growing in Oregon., where DraftKings has a monopoly.
I started a reverse gaming board for the gambling industry. Check out the board to see who is available, or fill out the form if you want to be included.
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