Sunday, Feb. 15, 2026 | 2 a.m.
Editor’s note: Este artículo está traducido al español.
Nevada’s political and gaming establishment is moving to choke off a Trump‑era rival to sports betting that just had a breakout Super Bowl.
This year’s Super Bowl 60 rematch between the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots drew a peak audience of about 137.8 million viewers, the highest in U.S. television history, according to the NFL and Nielsen.
But that national obsession did not show up in Nevada’s betting windows: Sportsbooks took in about $133.8 million in wagers on the game, the state’s lowest Super Bowl handle in roughly a decade.
At the same time, users on the prediction market Kalshi traded more than $1 billion in Super Bowl‑related contracts, a spike its CEO called a 2,700% increase from last year.
Platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket let users buy and sell “yes” or “no” contracts on future events, with prices meant to reflect the market’s estimate of the odds. Someone might buy a “yes” contract on the Seahawks winning at 60 cents — which implies a 60% chance of a Seattle victory — and receive $1 if the team wins, netting 40 cents in profit per contract. Supporters say this turns news and probabilities into a financial instrument, with prices continuously updating as information and opinions change, and they argue that such markets are tools for aggregating information rather than gambling.
“If we are gambling, then I think you’re basically calling the entire financial market gambling,” Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour told Axios last year.
That view isn’t universally held, especially in Nevada.
A state judge has temporarily barred Polymarket from offering event‑based contracts in Nevada, and the Gaming Control Board and attorney general are pursuing civil enforcement actions against Kalshi over its sports markets, treating them as unlicensed gambling.
MGM Resorts International CEO Bill Hornbuckle was blunt at a November meeting of the Nevada Gaming Commission: “It is without a doubt sports betting, full stop,” he said of sports prediction markets.
Gaming trade groups have been just as direct. At last year’s Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas, American Gaming Association CEO Bill Miller declared, “The AGA and our members are mobilizing across every battlefield. They’re threatening the communities we serve, the customers and consumers we protect and the standards we uphold.”
U.S. Rep. Dina Titus, a Democrat whose district includes the Las Vegas Strip, is trying to shut off sports prediction markets at the federal level. On Tuesday, she introduced the Fair Markets and Sports Integrity Act, a bill that would ban prediction markets on sports, effectively cutting off the vast majority of their current trading volume.
“If you can tell me going on the prediction market to say how many touchdowns somebody’s going to get is not a bet, I just can’t see the logic of that,” Titus said in an interview.
The Nevada Resort Association argues in a court filing that the products are functionally identical to sports bets that pay state taxes and follow Nevada’s strict rules.
Titus has cast her bill as both a consumer‑protection measure and a defense of Nevada’s tax base. She said that if a user believed a market was settled incorrectly, “there’s no gaming control board,” like in Nevada that you can go to and that taking a complaint to the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) means dealing with an agency unprepared for disputes.
That concern is not theoretical: For this year’s Super Bowl, both Kalshi and Polymarket listed contracts on whether the singer Cardi B would perform during Bad Bunny’s halftime show, and after she appeared on stage, Polymarket initially resolved to “yes” (though this was disputed) while Kalshi punted, settling the market at its most recent value. Kalshi’s decision has already yielded a complaint with the trading commission, with analyst Dustin Gouker noting, “They don’t have a bunch of, you know, regulators sitting around ready to deal with customer complaints.”
Titus is equally explicit about what’s at stake for Nevada. She warned that prediction markets don’t create “any kind of tax revenue, so states will lose out on that. And that revenue goes to fund things that you need like education, social services. Then sportsbooks will lose business, and that means losing workers.”
On the other hand, Nevada gaming taxes and related revenue are among the largest contributors to the state’s general fund, and casinos underpin tens of billions of dollars in annual economic activity.
Daniel Wallach, founder of the sports betting law firm Wallach Legal, said that “without sports, there are no prediction markets other than very minor, minor levels of activity. You take away sporting events, you remove the heart and the bulk of its business in valuation.”
For now, though, prediction markets are thriving outside Nevada. Gouker said the product is especially compelling in states that don’t offer legal sports betting and that frictions in Nevada’s online sports betting system make it easier for some people to turn to prediction apps instead. Instead of having to physically go to a sportsbook, “you can sit on your couch and fund your (Kalshi) account pretty easily,” he said.
And despite trade‑group warnings, DraftKings and FanDuel have announced their own prediction‑style products.
In Washington, prediction markets have momentum Nevada cannot ignore. Under President Joe Biden, the CFTC had tried to clamp down on event contracts, including suing Kalshi over plans to list markets on U.S. elections, but Kalshi won that case, clearing the way for election betting under federal derivatives law.
After President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, Kalshi quickly filed a notice with the commission to start listing sports event markets, and last month, the CFTC formally withdrew a proposed rule that would have banned sports‑related event contracts altogether.
CFTC Chairman Michael Selig recently said on a Bloomberg podcast that “we create rules and regulations around those markets to make sure that they have integrity, that they’re resilient, that they’re vibrant and they have guardrails and investor protections.”
But Wallach said that Selig is less hands-off than that sounds, believing he’s “full speed” ahead on sports event contracts despite saying during his confirmation hearings that he would defer to the courts on the issue.
The platforms also have friends close to the president.
Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., is listed as an adviser for both Polymarket and Kalshi, while the Trump Media & Technology Group is exploring building its own prediction market into the Truth Social platform.
On Thursday, Selig announced the creation of the CFTC’s Innovation Advisory Committee, whose membership includes Mansour and Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan.
Wallach doesn’t believe Titus’ legislation will make it through the current Congress due to the Trump family’s connections to the industry, but he thinks it could still shape the debate.
“The message being delivered to Congress is that these kinds of markets should not be legalized,” he said. “Whether her ban passes or not is probably less material than the impact it’s going to have as part of the debate going forward.”
That debate is now playing out in courtrooms around the country. The Dodd Frank Act empowered the CFTC to reject contracts considered gaming. Prediction markets assert their services shouldn’t fall under gaming. However, judges so far have been reluctant to read a postcrisis Wall Street reform law as a green light for nationwide sports betting.
“The courts have always invoked a strong presumption against preemption, and to overcome that presumption, you need to have clear and manifest language,” Wallach said. “At best, the arguments that the prediction market platforms make are based on ambiguities.”
In state cases, the focus is simpler: Are sports prediction markets just gambling by another name, and do they violate existing prohibitions on unlicensed wagering?
[email protected] / 702-990-8923 / @Kyle_Chouinard
date: 2026-02-15 15:03:00
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