There is a credible bull case for the likes of @Kalshi and @Polymarket disrupting the sports betting space (although maybe it is only a transient advantage), but the bear case is reinforced by too many of their public facing outlets seeming deeply/deliberately oblivious to the nature of a business where the (vast) majority have a losing experience. Prediction markets are (somewhat) novel in a US market sense, but are not something particularly new in a product sense. Whatever a gaming product looks like from the outside, or how it is promoted/hyped, I haven't worked in, or interacted with, a successful company in the gaming space that wasn't full of deeply serious people on the inside. The big companies now have decades of institutional understanding of how to provide a sports betting/casino/poker product. They understand bonuses, player retention/reactivation and have extensive tried and tested playbooks for user acquisition in both new and mature markets. They have multiple product lines and are increasingly effective at optimising the player journey to maximise revenue (which they then can reinvest in UA and brand to squeeze out competitors). From the more mature markets they've learned how to navigate responsible gaming and associated regulatory issues. I doubt many of them like the RG restrictions, but they were smart enough to see that the end stage of a free for all, and the negative publicity/enemies that generates, was doom. When I think back to the PokerStars org chart (of over a decade ago now) I can see what it really was - an astonishingly optimised structure for entering, establishing and eventually dominating markets. It took a long time, some astonishingly bold, and arguably lucky, decisions from some very serious people to reach that point. Does this mean they can't be disrupted? Of course not, and the prediction markets have certainly found a regulatory/competitive opportunity to exploit. The established gaming companies (especially in the US) are far from perfect and there are lots of areas where you could outcompete them. But none of that starts from pretending you have some novel customer experience. In the UK we've had @Betfair for decades. It's now a bit of a wasteland of liquidity, generally populated by people you generally never want to be on the other side of a bet/trade from. This is somewhat the story of any gaming vertical. The best poker players don't really want to be sitting at a table with the other best players. @Kalshi and @Polymarket aren't @Betfair of course. You can make 'predictions' on all sorts of things, but therein lies the paradox. The more opportunity you allow unsophisticated customers to lose their money on niche or comedic markets, the quicker they are going to incinerate their resources and end up churning to a competitor with a prominent sign up offer. At that point you are in a competition with entities with significant resources. There were hundreds of people working on the demand side at Stars across nearly every territory. The budget I oversaw, for player conversion alone, was nine figures. That was just a part of the overall marketing budget, and it was for a company with essentially a single product line at the time. Every time I see a hype boi tweet from one of the accounts promoting these companies (and recently it has even been employees!) I'm left wondering whether this is smart UGC adjacent marketing hoovering up the sort of customers who respond to it, or whether it is a sign of an unserious company. The former is a pretty interesting strategy (at least for those of us close to this space) - a sort of less grey take on the Rainbet/Stake approach. If it is the latter then it’s much harder to argue the bull case.