[overgard]

I think sports betting is a lot less harmful than prediction markets. With sports betting if someone throws a game to get a pay day, for instance, the only real consequence is on the reputation of the sport. In prediction markets, people can do all sorts of awful things to make money as insiders..

[_--__--__]

Most available data suggests that sports betting is much worse for the people making the bets, as it better targets people with poor impulse control. Bad bets in political markets aren't causing measurable increases in bankruptcy and domestic violence rates (https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-online-sports-gambling-exp...).

[RajT88]

I live in IL, and digital slots have taken over so many spaces. Online sports betting is bad enough, but more than that is going on.

Not just bars, but restaurants. Places you might take a date for nice Italian food have little corners with digital slots. Gas stations, Taco joints, sometimes an entire business in a strip mall dedicated to digital slots.

It's insane. The only place like it I'd seen prior to a some years back was Nevada. Businesses must be making crazy money off of them to be so prolific in putting them in, and that money comes from somewhere (i.e. not likely to be casual players).

[autoexec]

I passed through some of the cities around Chicago and was shocked by seeing the random slot machines everywhere. It brought to mind the hospital scene in idiocracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wymc2SGJkk0

That said, I actually played one at a restaurant while waiting for a carry out order and it ended up killing some time and paying for our meal that day. The impending downfall of society paid off for me that afternoon.

[striking]

I don't think that article supports your claim that bad bets in political markets aren't causing measurable increases in bankruptcy and domestic violence rates. It only tells us about online sportsbetting, and it was written in 2024 before prediction markets really took off. If anything, it provides evidence weakly in favor of the argument that bad bets in political markets would negatively affect the bettors.

[cyberax]

Likely because this type of betting is still niche. Give it some time.

[_--__--__]

Sports gambling a few advantages over any other subject that seem near insurmountable to me:

- it has the semi-respectable veneer of something that normal people have done throughout human history

- it has completely parasitized existing sports media to target new users in ways that aren't available for other topics

- some variant of 'sports' is happening 24/7/365 with enough prop bet granularity to capture the full attention and disposable income of addicts. There's an ongoing controversy with a star college football quarterback who was going to MLB games to place bets on every single individual pitch.

You can basically think of gambling addicts as a finite resource that these different companies are competing for. Many people get addicted to lootbox/gacha games at an early age, and even larger portion are already deep in sports gambling. The target demo for non-sports prediction markets roughly matches to people in earlier times who got into commodities futures or optimal strategies for casino games (which clearly existed but never at a scale to rival what we see with sports betting right now).

[prawn]

The sports gambling ads and offers to young males in Australia are absolutely relentless. Here's a recent story:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/may/16/how-b...

"Hudson also redeemed 489 gambling inducements, including 302 from Sportsbet and 72 from Bet365, the court heard – likely to be an underestimate of what was offered to him."

"On multiple occasions, Gray said, Hudson withdrew all the funds from his gambling accounts, and did not bet or deposit again until he received a deposit match inducement."

He opened his first gambling account literally on his 18th birthday. He had gambling accounts with five different bookies. His behaviour triggered alerts at the bookies dozens of times.

[dools]

Yeah, prediction markets are like if you could bet on arbitrary decisions a coach or manager might make. Like starting lineup or different trades of players between teams or the size of a players contract in dollars, rather than events that happen during gameplay. There are people who know the facts already but the public does not.

[827a]

There's a pretty decent counter-argument though: Prediction markets are just a market for users to counterparty each-other. Which means, technically, for every trade there is a winner and a loser, and both the winner and the loser are generally just normal people (or market makers). Polymarket/Kalshi just take X% on the top as a fee. Versus, with sports betting, the counterparty is the casino. Its the difference of trying to outsmart a massive casino, versus a more peer-to-peer system; the potential for ROI is (probably) higher in prediction markets.

I am still very, very anti prediction market, to be clear. But that is one reason why I would agree with a soft statement like "prediction markets are less harmful than sports betting" (in much the same way that a handgun is less harmful than a fully automatic rifle).

[potatototoo99]

The counterparty in prediction markets are whales though, and those are the few players making money off it. The ROI is also less negative in casinos and sports betting than prediction markets.

[superfrank]

First, over 90% of the wagers on Polymarket and Kalshi are already on sports (quoting John Oliver's Last Week Tonight on that one). Despite the headlines, Kalshi and Polymarket are mainly just sportsbooks.

Second, while yes, some of the markets available on prediction markets can push people to do awful things, there are plenty that are harmless. I'm cherry picking to make an extreme point, but I would so much rather have someone betting on what the temperature in Los Angeles is going to be tomorrow on Kalshi than betting on who will win the little league world series on DraftKings.

I support regulation saying certain things should not be allowed to be bet on, but allowing bets on morally questionable things isn't a quality unique to prediction markets.

[jeltz]

Technically they are betting exchanges. But they also probably have contracts with some of the big sportsbooks to provide liquidity too making them also kinda a sportsbook. I used to work at a betting exchange and we did have liquidity partners that made sure to increase the liquidity on our exchange.

[nojito]

>Kalshi and Polymarket are mainly just sportsbooks.

How? They sell contracts between two users. One side each. Completely different from a sportsbook where users are betting that the lines they set are not correct.

[Dylan16807]

Whether the people betting on the sports are betting directly with each other or not is a very small difference.

[Yizahi]

If they sell contracts on market prediction, then any person doing for example insider trading on corporations, fixing outcomes of sport events, directly paying out others to force event outcome, blackmailing people, or just directly adjusting some result like the CDG weather guy are completely in line with the platform rules and all that is perfectly legal. But since Poly and Kalshi themselves admit that those things are "unfair" and forbidden they have themselves removed their "just a contract" status and transitioned to a gambling status, where indeed fixing matches is bad.

[superfrank]

90% of the betting volume on Kalshi is betting on sports. I know how prediction markets work and how they're different that traditional sportsbooks, but they ultimately allow customers to do the same things.

If you are saying Kalshi isn't a sportsbook because the house isn't on the other side of the bet, you might as well argue that DraftKings isn't a sportsbook because they don't actually track your wagers in a book.

[bwhiting2356]

Prediction markets have a positive externality, the public gets information sooner. I never bet on kalshi or polymarket but I look at the markets because it's information. But I don't care about sports.