The Gamblification Of Everything
The integration of gambling into everything is starting to rub people the wrong way.
An interesting thing happened last Sunday, during the Golden Globe Awards, as Polymarket and prediction market advocates were touting its integration into the broadcast.
We have also seen integrations (some unveiled; some announced) with CNN, CNBC, Dow Jones, and more, as well as a smattering of partnerships with sports leagues (the NHL), about a dozen teams, and even an athlete (Bryson DeChambeau, although it appears the PGA disallows these relationships).
Basically, prediction markets have gone from a niche product that very few were aware of to mainstream in the space of a year — which just happens to coincide with the Kalshi’s entry into sports contracts.
But while prediction markets and their supporters are celebrating, the public has a different perspective on the ‘bet on everything’ messaging that is being pushed down its throat.
As The Wrap reported, “The Golden Globes’ partnership with prediction market platform Polymarket rankled some viewers during Sunday’s telecast, who slammed the integration as ‘a new low’ and ‘an end-times indicator’ as statistics on who was most likely to win certain categories encouraged viewers to place bets throughout the show.”
And then there is this, from Brian Phillips over at The Ringer:
“Generally speaking, do you like feeling your brain spin around in your head like Skittles in a high-torque blender? Perfect. Let me tell you about prediction markets, the bold new frontier in online betting—though the people who are getting rich off them insist they aren’t actually about betting at all…
“… To look at the front page of either Kalshi or Polymarket is to see a fun-house-mirror reflection of the contemporary world, one in which sports and entertainment are deliriously jumbled together with global horror and societal collapse.”
As Phillips sarcastically wrote, “Nothing can possibly go wrong!”
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Too, Too Much
As a former professional poker player (1999ish to 2006) and industry watcher I’ve been around a lot of gamblers: Pros, semi-pros, hobbyists, and everything in between. I was also playing poker pre-Poker Boom, which meant casino trips, backrooms of bars, and early online forums and poker sites with unmoderated chats, so I’m familiar with the type of customer that isn’t going to register an account at a licensed sportsbook and doesn’t have a casino rewards card.
One of the things I realized very early on was that getting people to gamble occasionally is pretty easy. Getting people to gamble regularly (even people who like to gamble) is very, very difficult.
Think of it this way: there are people who will go to the movies every night. But, far more will limit their movie theater trips to every Friday night. Most people will go to the movies a few times a year. A movie buff can try to get people to go to the movies every weekend, but most will tap out within a few weeks.
But that’s what is being foisted on the public, from the ‘betting on everything is good, actually,’ crowd (which extends beyond prediction markets): That thing you like to do occasionally, let me ram it down your throat and make you hate it.
When I was playing poker pre-Boom, the hardest part was finding a regular game.
First, most people don’t like steadily losing money; they quickly realize they’re at a disadvantage and that there are plenty of other ways to get some entertainment value out of their money.
More importantly, they have better things to do. The time commitment is a huge hurdle, and while someone might bet consistently for a few weeks, they are very likely to disappear for months or years.
To Everything, Churn, Churn, Churn
All of that is a long way of saying there’s a lot of churn in gambling. When we’re dealing with peer-to-peer gambling that’s a problem. When it’s P2P and the pool of players is small, that’s a big problem.
Pre-Boom, one of the top skills pros had was making games fun and enjoyable, and understanding not to run over the game all the time — you had to take some negative EV odds from time to time. If you don’t have some gamble in you, the game would dry up, or move on without you.
As we saw during the Poker Boom, it’s easier to deal with heavy churn when you’re pulling from a bigger pool, but it will still catch up with you down the road as more competitors enter the market and more and more players vanish. This is true for all peer-to-peer gambling, and I’d argue P2P gambling is one of the hardest ecosystems to keep in balance.
As Citizens recently noted, it looks like prediction markets (even at this early stage) could already be grappling with churn and struggling with retention:
“Kalshi has turned on the external marketing across media, including more traditional channels like TV and radio… That said, volume only increased 3% MoM in December despite adding in new partners like Robinhood and Webull and integrating into CNN and CNBC in recent months, compared to the historical sports betting seasonality of handle declining 3% MoM in December.
“The +3% and -3% figures represent the lowest delta between volume and seasonality growth since April 2025, raising the question around churn rates for its customers.
“We have seen similar flash-in-the-pan-type moments in this industry, like Caesars in 2022 and PENN Entertainment (ESPN Bet) in 2023, with massive customer acquisition events over a several-month period, but they ultimately failed to retain customers.
“We will monitor these trends moving forward, but if we are seeing massive churn, this could 1) represent peak cannibalization of the sports betting industry; or 2) consumers are just substituting or sharing wallets across the other dozen prediction market platforms that have launched in recent months.”
The Gamblification of Everything
Circling back to the main point of this column, 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.
Here’s the thing, gamblers are fine with gambling invading every waking moment of their lives. The vast majority of people are not. They want whatever level of gambling they participate in separated from their day-to-day activities. And that’s where the pushback comes from (which seems to be growing day by day).
As an aside, as a former professional gambler, I used to possess a worldview that I now know is diametrically opposed to that of the average person. It took me a couple of years to recalibrate from looking at the world solely through an EV (expected value) lens, to a more nuanced worldview that still uses EV, but mixed with intuition, reason, and compromise.
There is an ongoing effort to “gamify” everything, but as Kim Lund (a podcast guest on Episode #8, #34, and #60) put it on LinkedIn, most of these efforts are really just gamblifying:
“If you're considering implementing a B2B #gamification platform then maybe think about why you then don't really consider your content to be games in the first place.
“The snake-oil version of gamification is often about finding engaging ways to introduce various forms of extrinsic rewards in otherwise intrinsically motivated tasks, actions and workflows.”
That may be welcomed by the betting community, but it’s rallying opposition. As I noted above, most people either don’t want to bet at all or bet infrequently, that majority doesn’t want to see traditional gambling ads everywhere, never mind on what someone might say during a press conference.
No más.