Nevada gaming chair says sports prediction contracts are sportsbook bets

Nevada Gaming Control Board Chairman Mike Dreitzer has said contracts tied to sports results are, in substance, sportsbook wagers, dismissing the distinctions prediction-market operators and federal derivatives regulation draw between the two products.

Speaking during an Indian Gaming Association webinar on Oct. 14, Dreitzer compared a $10 bet on an NFL game through an online sportsbook with a $10 contract on the same outcome. “The transactions are effectively identical,” he said, according to Focus Gaming News. The form in which a wager is offered, he argued, does not alter its underlying nature.

Dreitzer challenged several arguments made for treating such contracts differently from gambling. The ability to exit a position before a game ends is not novel, he said, because online sportsbooks have long offered cash-out features. Nor does direct trading between participants place the activity outside gambling law, he argued, pointing to poker, horse racing and bingo.

He also questioned whether customers invariably trade with one another. Hedge funds, designated contract markets and affiliated trading firms may take the other side of retail customers’ positions, he said, potentially giving more sophisticated players an advantage rather than creating an even playing field. Dreitzer rejected the industry’s price-discovery rationale and raised concerns that some platforms allow users as young as 18.

The remarks followed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Oct. 9 interim final rule excluding qualifying traditional gambling products, including sportsbook wagers and casino games, from the federal definition of a swap. The measure was intended to reinforce the division between gambling overseen by states and federally recognized tribes and derivatives traded in financial markets.

Before that rule, the CFTC had sent two proposed rules to the White House Office of Management and Budget. One would expressly exclude casino-style gambling from the definition of a swap, while the other would establish that event contracts qualify as swaps. Dreitzer criticized the agency’s effort to create a separate regulatory approach for event contracts.

In separate remarks reported by Gaming America on the New Normal webinar, Dreitzer called prediction markets and sports-event contracts “criminal” and described the proposed distinction as an “untenable distinction without a difference.” He said Nevada’s gaming authorities had identified sports-event contracts as a “scam” from the outset, and that Kalshi no longer operates in Nevada after the state’s successful challenge.

Dreitzer’s position echoes concerns raised by the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board in 2025 testimony to the CFTC. The board said sports-outcome contracts were sports wagering under another name, and warned that operators claiming federal derivatives oversight could form a parallel system outside Pennsylvania’s established gambling framework. It said state-regulated sports betting carries licensing, tax, responsible-gaming, integrity-monitoring and consumer-protection obligations that prediction-market operators could avoid through regulatory arbitrage.

The Nevada chairman’s intervention also adds to the wider push for federal action on sports-event contracts. As we reported last month, Nevada Rep. Steven Horsford urged Congress to prevent federally regulated platforms from packaging sports betting and casino-style games as financial products.