The Bulletin Board
THE LEDE: Prediction markets are trying to do what very few people want.
EKG CHART of the WEEK: Is Hard Rock Spending Its Way to Market Share?
ROUNDUP: A look at the stories you may have missed.
AROUND the WATERCOOLER: Jessica Welman shifts to advocacy role.
STRAY THOUGHTS: All aboard the hype train.
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The Lede: Most People Don’t Want to Financialize Everything
I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: The only people who want to financialize everything are people who will benefit from the financialization of everything.
The restaurant experience provides a great example of this: When you sit down, a restaurant will bring you bread, popcorn, or chips and salsa. You didn’t order it and would decline it if it was an extra $2. Still, it’s there, so you eat it.
The idea that the average person (which includes the average sports bettor or casino-goer) is actively searching for 24/7 unfettered access to bets on anything from the Finnish cross-country skiing trials to what someone will say on a late-night talk show is a vast overstatement.
However, like pre-meal bread, if it’s there, they might eat it. And just like the bread, before you know it, you’ve polished off a basket, and your appetite for the main course is dulled. Suddenly you find yourself regretting it, and the restaurant for plying you with it.
If an app pings you with a notification, “Bet $5 on whether the host says ‘viral’ tonight,” you might tap yes. Not because you’re a degenerate gambler, but because it’s there.
Most people don’t want that type of access to betting. And many, who are otherwise unopposed to gambling, will find it somewhere between distasteful and reprehensible; the classic case of making enemies out of allies.
Think of the casual bettor who enjoys a yearly Super Bowl wager or even placing semi-regular bets, but resents the constant nudges turning their phone into a slot machine. The result: Text messages blocked and app uninstalled.
In a world racing to financialize everything, the question is, who benefits? And maybe the solution isn’t more markets, but fewer baskets of bread. Maybe it’s time to push back the bread basket.
“Generally speaking, people are okay with random “silly” bets tied to major events like the Super Bowl — Gatorade colors and length of the National Anthem — but when this starts to invade their day-to-day lives, there’s a Roberto Durán ‘no más’ moment that occurs… Gamblers are fine with gambling invading every waking moment of their lives. The vast majority of people are not.”
Bottom Line: Prediction markets are not going anywhere (whether they remain in the sports betting business is an open question), but anyone who thinks the regulatory guardrails won’t narrow once the public feels it is being force-fed these products hasn’t been paying attention.
EKG Chart of the Week: The Continued Rise of Hard Rock
Source: Eilers & Krejcik Gaming proprietary benchmarking and earnings signal tracking used by leading online gambling businesses and investors.
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Eilers & Krejcik Gaming (a newsletter sponsor) indicates a noticeable cooling in promotional spend, with a single exception: Hard Rock Bet. That spending seems to be paying off, as EKG noted in its US Sports Betting Monitor estimates, Hard Rock now has more than an 8% national OSB GGR share — Hard Rock is only available in ten states, which makes the 8% number all the more impressive; FanDuel is live in 23 states and DraftKings in 26 states.
One of Hard Rock’s biggest targets is Michigan, where EKG estimates Hard Rock has accounted for 20% of all promotional spending since it launched in December 2025. As Golden Nugget’s online casino discovered in New Jersey, there is some benefit to coming in late when other operators’ spend has subsided, with the caveat that you need a good product to retain those customers.
Hard Rock has a very high floor, as it holds a monopoly on sports betting in Florida, which means it’s unlikely to go below 5% nationally. But that doesn’t tell the entire Hard Rock story. As EKG put it, Hard Rock has several things going for it, including a solid executional track record and an increasingly distinctive and resonant product that is trending toward the Top 5 in EKG’s app ranking.
Roundup: So Much News; So Little Newsletter Space
Two MLS players banned for life over gambling allegations [Compliance+More]: “Two former Major League Soccer players have been banned for life for gambling on matches, the league announced Monday. Derrick Jones and Yaw Yeboah were placed on administrative leave in October 2025 as the league probed potential rules violations following a series of suspicious betting alerts filed by MLS partners.” According to C+M, “MLS investigators uncovered “extensive gambling” by Jones and Yeboah over the 2024 and 2025 seasons, including on their own matches. Both players successfully bet on Jones to receive a yellow card during a game in October 2024, according to the investigation.”
SEC and CFTC Chairs make a joint podcast appearance [All-In Podcast]: The prediction market discussion starts at 19:00. One interesting part was CFTC Chairman Michael Selig saying the goal is clear rules and not regulating by enforcement.
Florida Senate confirms five gaming commissioners [Florida Politics]: The Florida Senate formally confirmed all five members of the Florida Gaming Control Commission. The Senate confirmed three current commissioners Julie Brown (Chair), John Michael D’Aquila, and Tina Repp, as well as Gov. Ron DeSantis’s two new appointees, Peter Cuderman and William Spicola.
NCAA partners with IC360 to catch impermissible bettors [ESPN]: “The NCAA announced Tuesday that it will begin monitoring its officials in this year’s basketball, baseball and softball championships with ProhiBet, a technology by Integrity Compliance 360 (IC360) that crosschecks anonymized identification data with sportsbooks to flag impermissible bettors. IC360 works with sports leagues and sportsbooks to track the betting market.”
Kindbridge Research Institute and UCLA release new report on gambling-related financial harm [CDC Gaming Reports]: Kindbridge Research Institute’s Financial Stability and Responsible Gambling Initiative, launched in partnership with UCLA, recently released a report, Gambling-Related Financial Harm: A Public Health Approach to Financial Stability in a Digital Era, “which examines how gambling has become more digitally embedded in everyday financial life and why early indicators of harm often go undetected.” FSRG Initiative Project Lead Kary Carbone said in a statement: “Financial stress linked to gambling often appears long before people reach crisis or clinical care. But today those signals are scattered across financial, healthcare, and payment systems that rarely connect the dots. This report highlights why earlier coordination could help identify risk sooner and prevent harm from escalating.”
Texas poker room raided and shut down [PokerNews]: “PokerNews has confirmed that The Lodge Card Club in Round Rock, Texas, co-owned by Doug Polk, Andrew Neeme, and Brad Owen, was raided by state police and the Texas Alcoholic and Beverage Commission (TABC) Tuesday morning… It is unclear at this time whether the raid is poker-related or regarding a liquor license… The World Poker Tour (WPT) was scheduled to host a special event at the Austin-area poker club on March 13, but that has been called off due to the current circumstances with the host venue.” Lodge isn’t the first poker room raid in Texas, with the legality of membership poker rooms still an open question. Previous STTP coverage of membership poker rooms here.
NCPG throws support behind POINTS Act, a pared-down GRIT Act [Press Release]: Last year the National Council on Problem Gambling threw its support behind the GRIT Act, which would have set aside 50% of the federal sports betting excise tax to fund problem gambling programs. This year, it’s the POINTS Act, which would “set aside one-third of the federal sports excise tax revenue to fund programs focused on the prevention, screening, intervention, and treatment of problem gambling.” While this seems like a no-brainer, as with the GRIT Act, the industry is unlikely to get on board, as it wants the tax repealed, which it never will be if it is a primary source of funding for problem gambling.
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Around the Watercooler
Social media conversations, rumors, and gossip.
Jessica Welman (Podcast #10 and #57) is embarking on a new journey, as she is moving on from SBC Americas, and reporting/journalism in general, but staying in the gambling industry.
Welman has decided to join Brianne Doura-Schawohl (also a podcast guest, Episode #17 and #27) “to lobby and advocate for better RG and PG rules in the regulated gambling space and it. Is. Awesome.”
Here’s the full tweet — regular readers will recognize many of these same concerns and complaints from my newsletter, as I said in December, “This is not the legal, regulated gambling industry I was promised when I first started advocating for legalization in the 2000s.”
Stray Thoughts
I would add that a lot of successful people (as well as idiots) tried to convince people this was true. Seems like there is a lot of that going around.
As I said in the newsletter previously about NFTs (or Cabbage Patch Kids, Beanie Babies, or meme coins) “Beware the hype train - unless you’re among the lucky few who make a quick buck by getting in early and getting out before the bubble bursts.”