If the differentiating factor is just who you’re betting against, how are Kalshi et al any different from online poker? It’s still gambling, the house just takes a rake
Because you can easily collude and cheat at poker so it needs to be heavily regulated or outright illegal to prevent theft. You can't really cheat at prediction markets, unless you have insider information which they can litigate after the fact.
Surely you’re being facetious, insider trading is obviously a huge problem that is rarely enforced and we’ve already seen instances of people actively influencing events or using false information to fake the result of a bet
> You can't really cheat at prediction markets
Lots of folks gripe about how Kalshi adjudicates contracts.
The one I remember is from Polymatket, about whether Trump would end the Gaza war by a certain date. I bet no, and it resolved to yes on the basis that Trump said that he ended the war.
I agree that whether the house has a stake in the outcome is (probably, I haven’t read the statute) not relevant to the definition of what is and is not gambling under Utah state law. Online Poker is very obviously a game though in a way that Kalshi and online brokerages aren’t (even if they share game like elements, such as random rewards). Important to caveat that prediction markets do allow you to speculate on the outcomes of games occurring off the platform, and maybe that is the distinction here between Kalshi and Robinhood, but then is Kalshi still “obviously” a gambling site if they ban markets on sports outcomes but leave everything else?
If they ban markets on sports outcomes they lose 90% of their business