00:00Meanwhile, Charlie Baker of the NCAA has planted his flag.
00:04He wants to see the end of prediction markets and, of course, is a little bit nervous with
00:08all of the different stories that we've heard surrounding sports betting allegations of
00:14some folks being corrupt out there and maybe some point shaving.
00:18It does make some sense here.
00:19I just wonder which of the sports betting operators are going to stand with the NCAA
00:23because if they do lower some of these max bets, especially on the unders, which does
00:28seemingly come into play, which, by the way, I agree with.
00:31But, you know, sports betting operators stand to lose money then.
00:34So I wonder how this goes.
00:36Yeah, in light of these recent scandals that we've talked about over the past couple weeks
00:40with, I think, like 30-plus players in college basketball being involved in, you know, this
00:46FBI indictment with point shaving and whatnot, like you mentioned, Craig, the sports books
00:50are now facing pressure to tweak their bets, change and restrictions and add different
00:55things to kind of combat this.
00:56You know, it's a good thing, certainly this activity was flagged and it was flagged because
01:02it happened on these legal sports books.
01:04What Charlie Baker is coming out saying now is, you know, prediction markets don't have
01:07any of those safeguards that would have caught this activity.
01:10They don't have any of the better monitoring verification.
01:14So you don't know if an athlete is potentially betting on a sport or not.
01:17And we just don't know how much of this activity is actually going on on prediction markets.
01:21What he's asking the CFTC to do, again, that's the agency that's supposed to regulate these
01:26prediction markets, is create a robust set of safeguards similar to what states require
01:32of sports books that involves all of that stuff.
01:35A lot of these prediction markets say they already do third-party monitoring, but none
01:40of it is actually required.
01:42There's no ruling body.
01:43The CFTC has largely just let the status quo be sort of a laissez-faire environment where
01:49these prediction markets do things and then people react.
01:52You know, you'll recall maybe a month ago, we talked about Kalshi moving to list a market
01:56on transfer portals or transfer portal decisions by athletes, which was really alarming.
02:02The NCAA came out against that, said it's really, you know, just idiotic and stupid.
02:05They would try to do that.
02:07Kalshi and these other companies have really tried to push the envelopes and what they're
02:10able to offer.
02:11It hasn't been listed yet, but it's just another kind of thing that the NCAA has come
02:15out and said, hey, we need rules to safeguard and prevent this stuff.
02:19We just want the CFTC to do something rather than let the status quo be, because again,
02:23they said the status quo cannot, that cannot be what just continues going forward.
02:28But this could be, you know, I don't think this would actually happen where these prediction
02:33markets are banned explicitly from offering these college props, at least not anytime soon.
02:38But it would be a really big blow to their business, notably Hold Crunch came out this
02:42week and said that the college football handle is actually about only 1.2 times as much as
02:48the NFL, right?
02:49The NFL is 1.2 times as much as college football.
02:52And then for sportsbooks, it's about four times.
02:55So it's a lot more of Kalshi's business is coming from college sports, which could be
03:00due to any number of things, due to lower age requirement, due to these less robust amount
03:05of safeguards, but it would be a big, bigger blow to their business than sportsbooks losing
03:08it.
03:09So I thought that was an interesting wrinkle as well.
03:10But again, just because the NCAA is mad about something doesn't mean it'll actually
03:15happen, as you know very well.
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