Stone Cold Matt Kalish

Last week, DraftKings cofounder Matt Kalish woke up and chose violence, and has been taking shots at Kalshi for several days.

The Bulletin Board

• THE LEDE: DraftKings cofounder Matt Kalish goes in on prediction markets.

• VIEWS: EKG Prediction Market Monitor looks at the competitive landscape.

• VIEWS: Kalshi joins the National Council on Problem Gambling.

• AROUND the WATERCOOLER: Content theft.

• STRAY THOUGHTS: Be careful what you wish for.

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The Lede: DK Cofounder Confounded by Prediction Markets

DraftKings cofounder Matt Kalish has done the social media equivalent of a WWE “run-in.”

It started with Kalish pointing out a fundamental flaw of the prediction market model: Its reliance on liquidity:

Some users thought Kalish didn’t understand the underlying dynamics, but his overarching point is a valid one — say what you will about being limited on sportsbooks, but the “slippage” at prediction markets seems larger than the real and listed value of a baseball card:

Front Office Sports did a solid job reporting on this yesterday (which led me to delete about half of my post), including speaking to “Noah Zingler-Sternig, former head of operations at Kalshi who recently launched a fund investing in prediction-market businesses, was among those pushing back. ‘We’d all prefer less slippage, but that’s not how markets work,’ he said (slippage refers to the gap between the expected price and the final execution price).”

But Kalish’s criticisms hit on two points I’ve talked about in the past:

The final tweet above is something Straight to the Point has touched on in the past; the bane of all peer-to-peer gambling: Churn.

From a November 2025 column:

“My theory all along is that the product only resonates with a niche market. Like trying the new restaurant in town, if the product isn’t up to snuff, they’ll move on rather quickly… While I’m a prediction market fan (for certain things), I’m not a prediction market fanboy who sees them as revolutionary, like social media or mobile apps. Especially when it comes to sports betting.”

And from September 2025:

“The wider the gap between depositors (the “takers,” who bet casually) and withdrawers (the “makers” or “sharps” who consistently win), the faster the ecosystem burns through its recreational players — the lifeblood of any betting platform… Traditional sportsbooks have spent years building guardrails — limits, bans, and dynamic odds — to manage sharp bettors. Prediction markets, with their light regulatory touch and desire to grow, grow, grow, are wide open. That’s a feature until it’s a bug.”

Kalish went on to say:

As Straight to the Point recently noted: “We are being told the fundamental difference between prediction markets and sportsbooks is that there isn’t a house, prediction markets are a peer-to-peer offering.”

However, it’s becoming more and more clear that retail bettors have about as much of a chance of profiting as they do in a poker game with top pros.

Kalish is also just tossing out random grenades, too:

I’ll address another of Kalish’s criticisms in an upcoming newsletter, as it deserves its own separate entry.

And finally, can we just bask in the glory that Kalish and Kalshi go together like Catena Media and former interim CEO Pierre Cadena.

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Views: EKG PM Monitor Looks at PMs vs. OSBs

This is the third and final entry on Eilers & Krejcik Gaming’s inaugural Prediction Market Monitor (key findings and purchase options here), a 47-page breakdown of the prediction market landscape.

As previously noted, three findings jumped out at me (two of which I already covered):

• The Opportunity

• The Headwinds

And today it’s time to look at the third in the trio: The competitive landscape, which shows Kalshi in the Top 5 when it comes to Handle per Adult, just ahead of BetMGM.

But a deeper dive into the numbers shows that an outsized portion (69%) of sports contract volume comes from non-sports betting states:

That raises an important question: Can Kalshi (and other prediction markets) go toe-to-toe with sportsbooks?

As I said in an August 2025 newsletter, historically, prediction markets don’t perform well head-to-head with sportsbooks:

“Evidence from mature markets such as the UK and Australia suggests that where betting exchanges and traditional sportsbooks coexist, the market is typically dominated by traditional sportsbooks… As Regulus said in a recent note, the model hasn’t set the world on fire in other corners of the globe, despite having the same structural advantages: ‘We believe that the biggest danger for prediction markets is that they are structurally small and weak without professional layers to provide liquidity, especially delivering the longer-odds bets and parlays that mass market customers (and many whales) like.’ Everyone thinks prediction markets will figure it out and offer these products, but broad adoption beyond niche users remains unproven.”

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Quick Hitter: Kalshi joins the NCPG

As reported by Axios:

“Kalshi is joining the National Council on Problem Gambling, becoming the first prediction market to do so.

“Why it matters: The move is an acknowledgment that certain users may be engaging in troubling financial behavior on the platform, even as the company continues to refer to user activity as “trading,” not gambling.”

Per Axios, “Kalshi will also become a member of the group’s recently formed subcategory for financial services and trading companies.”

According to a press release from Kalshi, it has pledged $2 million, over two years, to the NCPG — Kalshi will join the NCPG as a Platinum-level member, which typically costs $15,000, and will become a part of the NCPG’s Leadership Circle, which has a $100,000 price tag and currently has five members, with four more companies in a slightly lower Leadership Circle tier.

“As part of the grant, they’re also going to work toward getting accredited through us, through our responsible gambling standards. We are actually updating the document to be a little bit more applicable to prediction markets — but I will stress it is already very applicable to prediction markets, and with that will come certain requirements that we expect for them to have,” Cole Wogoman, the NCPG’s director of policy and partnerships told Axios.

First, as Axios noted, Kalshi is now enacting policies and initiatives to curb problem gambling, while it draws distinctions between its products and sports betting. Essentially, we are going to put up guardrails just like gambling apps, while pounding our fist on the table that we are not gambling. While it will quell (some) concerns from responsible gambling advocates, it is likely to be used as ammunition by its opponents.

Second, The National Council on Problem Gambling is going to get a lot of questions, like: How does the NCPG square Kalshi being 18+ and other prediction market policies that run counter to NCPG policy guidelines? As I previously wrote, since the departure of Keith Whyte, the NCPG feels like a ship adrift at sea.

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Around the Watercooler

Social media conversations, rumors, and gossip.

Apparently the author, and all of their content were scrubbed from the SI site:

This is something — the rise of AI-generated fake bylined articles and content theft plaguing affiliate sites — Lance Bradley and I discussed on my podcast recently:

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Stray Thoughts

“When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.” ~ Oscar Wilde