American Gaming Association

American commercial gaming took $6.48 billion in August, a fraction less than a year earlier, because sportsbooks kept less of what was bet. Handle barely moved; hold fell from 10.8% to 9.2%, and the American Gaming Association blames prediction markets and a late college football start for the rest.

The Senate Commerce Committee chairman intends to file legislation after the 3 November midterms that would bar gambling-linked event contracts, sports included, unless a state or tribe authorises them, Bloomberg Law reports. No text, bill number or co-sponsor is public yet, and the window before this Congress ends is short.

States that legalised online sports betting saw more depression and anxiety prescriptions and outpatient diagnoses among the employer-insured, a JAMA Psychiatry paper finds. It is a population-level association, not proof of harm to bettors, and it adds a clinical strand to evidence that has so far been mostly financial.

The Federal Trade Commission has begun an early-stage review of online sportsbooks such as FanDuel and DraftKings, The Washington Sun reported, citing three sources. Nothing is on the record yet: DraftKings says it has had no civil investigative demand and the agency declined to comment.

US states spent about $145 million of the $188 million they allocated to problem gambling services in FY2025, and 48% of funded states spent at least 5% less than their budgets, according to the national association of state administrators. The share has barely moved since FY2023, which makes it a capacity problem rather than a one-off.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has published the two rules it sent to the White House last month: one, in force the day it appears in the Federal Register, says a bet with a licensed sportsbook or casino is not a swap; the other proposes that event contracts, sports included, are. The line runs through who sells the product and where it trades, not what it is.

The senator whose name is on the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act and the CFTC chairman who implemented it have told the Supreme Court that Congress never moved sports betting from the states to the commodities regulator. The American Gaming Association, 145 tribes and tribal groups and Atlantic City's casinos filed too, and there is still nothing on the docket for Kalshi.

The Michigan Gaming Control Board has written to 33 unlicensed casino, sweepstakes-style and sports betting sites, and this time it led with a player-protection argument: the state's self-exclusion database binds only licensed operators. Two of the names were already on the list it published in April.

Families and Friends of Gamblers, a Boston nonprofit built by the tobacco litigator Richard Daynard's institute, has named a 10-member board it says has no connection to gambling interests and is recruiting from the problem gambling councils around the National Council on Problem Gambling. It is a rival pitch rather than a split inside the council, timed for a moment when the NCPG has no permanent leader in sight.

The London-listed events group is paying 11.1 times Clarion's expected 2027 EBITDA, part-funded by a £940 million share placing. The gambling industry's largest trade show is about to pass from private equity to a listed owner that names gaming as a growth category.

A Chicago judge has found that Kalshi's championship contracts are likely swaps and that Illinois likely cannot make the exchange take out a sports wagering licence. She has not yet ruled on the state's new 1.75% to 3.5% prediction-market fee, and her reasoning puts her at odds with a Wisconsin judge in the same circuit and with two federal appeals courts.

On the opening main stage at G2E, the chief executives of MGM Resorts and Caesars called prediction markets illegal, "obscene" and a risk to the whole industry. Wynn Resorts' Craig Billings said his company had no "skin in the game", and recalled what the Strip lost by fighting California's tribes.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has asked the White House to clear a rule defining event contracts as swaps, the classification on which its claim to exclusive jurisdiction rests, and a second that would exclude "casino-style gambling products" with immediate effect. Neither text is public, and both arrive days after a second federal appeals court rejected the swaps argument.

Research commissioned by the American Gaming Association says gamblers score higher on financial literacy than non-gamblers, and that prediction-market users are nearly as confident as sports bettors but test like non-gamblers. The trade body is using it against the exchanges.

Eilers & Krejcik's first combined forecast credits sportsbooks with $31.7 billion and the exchanges with an $8.4 billion "handle analog", a translation of exchange volume into sportsbook terms that it has not published. The AGA sees sportsbooks flat at $29.5 billion; Week 1 data suggests the exchange share may be larger.

The geolocation supplier's count of sportsbook activity on 13 September ran ahead of Super Bowl LX, and new accounts more than quadrupled, in the same week that prediction-market apps out-downloaded every sportsbook. The two datasets are measuring different things, and the gap between them is the story of this season.

Fourteen months after the "Big Beautiful Bill" cut deductible losses to 90%, the Ways and Means Committee has attached the fix to a crypto tax bill and sent it to the floor. It still needs the House, the Senate and the President before 1 January, and the House is about to leave town.

Judge Lorna Schofield heard the commission argue that the Commodity Exchange Act pre-empts New York's $3.4 billion gambling case against Coinbase and Gemini, and pressed its lawyers on why she should enjoin the state when other federal courts have declined to. She did not rule from the bench.

A state that bans sports betting and casinos spent Tuesday studying "the sudden inundation of prediction market gambling". The casino lobby told senators to sue in state court; Kalshi told them a ban would send Texans offshore. The session that could act on it opens on 12 January.

Polymarket, Coinbase, Robinhood and six others have been told to cease and let residents withdraw their money, while PayPal, Sportradar, Genius Sports, ESPN, Apple and Google have been subpoenaed for what they know.

The bank can see what its own customers pay into betting apps and what comes back out, and across seven months the ratio never reached break-even. The number that should worry the industry more is the one about balances: households that bet online hold 59% of the deposit balance of households that do not.

Told by regulators in Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania that it could not offer both, Underdog has chosen its CFTC-registered event contracts over the draft games that built the company. Drafts close in those states on Wednesday evening, after the NFL season kicks off.

The American Gaming Association expects Americans to bet $29.5 billion legally on the 2026 NFL season, up barely at all on last year's $29.4 billion. Its chief executive says the reason is "backdoor sports betting" on prediction markets, and the numbers it cites for Novig, Rothera and Underdog explain why.

The American Gaming Association's strategic adviser told CNBC that Michael Selig misled the President about how the state cases are going, and that prediction market chiefs were uninvited from last week's White House event. The second claim is the one worth checking.