Last August I wrote a column for 4for4 called “Why I’m Playing Daily Fantasy Sports in 2025. And Why You Should Too.” Somewhere in the second paragraph, while listing the ways fans can get invested in the games they love, I described prediction markets as “creeping onto the horizon with their definitely-not-sports-betting-in-any-way products.”
Consider this the follow-up that sentence was always going to need. The horizon arrived ahead of schedule, and when I went out to meet it I found the most exciting development in my corner of the sports world since DFS itself. So here’s some news I’ve been sitting on for a while: I’m writing for PredictQ, and you’re reading me on our brand new site.
Readers who know my DFS work know the outline already. I deposited my home league winnings in December 2014, built that into more than $4.5 million in profit over eleven years, and spent most of that time telling anyone who would listen why Daily Fantasy Sports deserved their attention. All of that still stands. I’m playing DFS again this NFL season, and my Sunday mornings will look the way they always have. The same habit that built my bankroll, hunting for games where a prepared player gets a fair shot, is what led me here.
What won me over is what I found when I finally looked under the hood. I had only ever seen prediction markets from a distance, and terms like “event contract” made them sound like a finance product built for somebody else. When I sat down and traced how the money moves on a real exchange, the mechanics reminded me of the game I already knew and loved.
Looking for a 101 article on Prediction Markets to better understand the lingo?
In last year’s column I gave four reasons I’ve stuck with DFS. Can you win and keep winning? Can you claim a championship of your own? Does the money move on a reasonable clock? Are you competing against real people? Those questions are how I size up anything that wants my bankroll, so I ran prediction markets through each of them.
Winning, and staying welcome
The heart of last year’s piece was a casino story. Win every hand of poker and the casino puts your name on the sign outside, since the rake pays them whichever way the pot goes. Try the same run at the blackjack table and security starts learning your face. Sportsbooks behave like the blackjack pit, which is why a winning bettor eventually spends more energy getting money down than finding the next edge.
An exchange runs on poker room logic. The person across from your contract is another trader who took the opposite view, and the venue earns its fee however the market resolves, so nobody upstairs has any reason to show a winner the door.
The fees carry the same lesson. Last year I noted that sportsbooks in some states have reported holding upward of 20 to 30 percent on parlays, while DFS rake tops out around 16 percent and dips into single digits in plenty of contests. An analysis of 64 NBA, NHL and MLB markets this past March and April measured Kalshi’s effective vig at roughly 0.85 percent, against about 4.62 percent on matching sportsbook lines. A cheap toll won’t make anyone a winner by itself, though every point of hold is ground a player has to recover before an edge shows up in the balance.
Success that ignores your team
The most personal part of last year’s column was about the Washington Bullets, the team I chose as a kid in the late 80s and have now spent almost forty years waiting on to win a championship. Fantasy sports and DFS let me quit waiting. My first live final win came at FanDuel’s world fantasy baseball championship in San Diego in 2018, and it felt like a ring, whatever Washington's NBA team was doing that week. The itch apparently never goes away, because I’ve since added a FanDuel basketball title in 2021 and a DraftKings fantasy MMA belt in 2025.
Prediction markets widen the field beyond anything DFS can offer. My DFS edge has to live inside a box score. On an exchange the board covers the World Cup, the Fed, the Emmys, a Senate race, and whatever else enough people care to price. Sports made up roughly 85 percent of Kalshi’s June volume, and the quieter corners of the board are where the strangest edges hide.
My favorite example comes from Rolling Stone, which profiled a middle school teacher who profited on Kalshi’s music markets by reading vinyl pre-sale data better than the crowd. He leaves nearly everything else alone. For those of us raised on fantasy, where football knowledge was the only kind that paid, it takes a while to absorb the idea that any expertise can be traded.
A better clock than daily
Last year I argued timeframes. Best Ball drafts in August and pays in January, which means six months of hoping your tight end is still ambulatory. That long sweat can be half the fun, though a payout window that stretches across two calendar years makes it hard to roll winnings into the next play. Live betting pays out within minutes but tends to reclaim the money just as quickly. The daily rhythm of DFS lets an edge compound, since tomorrow always brings another slate.
Exchanges take that strength of DFS and add a wrinkle I underestimated. Markets run around the clock on everything from tonight’s games to next winter’s, and positions can be sold before resolution. A contract bought at 30 cents can go out the door at 55 on a Tuesday, long before the event settles, so being right early pays on its own schedule. Sportsbooks offer something similar through cashout buttons, though most bettors never check how much the book skims off the top of those offers. Selling on an exchange fills at whatever the market will pay, and once you’ve compared the two prices side by side, this feature becomes one of the strongest selling points prediction markets have.
Real people on the other side
Fantasy sports began for most of us as a way to stay close to old friends and coworkers, and DFS kept that alive for me in ways I never expected. Rivals from bitter online arguments became people I look forward to seeing at live finals. My daughter grew up flying to those finals in a tiny Squirrel Patrol jersey, asking me which team on the TV was the Squirrel Patrols.
An order book holds people too. Every contract you buy exists because a real person somewhere concluded you were wrong, and there's an extra kick in proving that person wrong. Outsmarting the guy across the table is the same rush I've been chasing since my first home league. What the space has been missing is a room where those people can find each other.
The scale of it surprised me once I started paying attention. Kalshi and Polymarket combined for roughly $45 billion in volume in June alone, up from under $5 billion last September. An estimated 70 percent of prediction market users lose money, and part of the reason is that no place exists to learn the craft, the way RotoGrinders once served DFS players. Building that home is what PredictQ set out to do, right down to a Discord where traders swap prediction market takes the way my old leaguemates argued waiver claims.
Where I’d still be careful
I checked the rake on parlays last year, so the fine print on my own industry gets the same treatment.
The legal picture is live. The Third Circuit ruled in Kalshi’s favor in April, holding that sports event contracts are swaps under the Commodity Exchange Act and that federal oversight preempts the states. In June the CFTC proposed a rule that would formalize the category while restricting parts of today’s board, including injury markets and certain props. State regulators keep fighting, and anyone who describes all this as settled hasn’t read the docket.
Liquidity thins quickly away from the majors. A World Cup final carries a deep book, while a small overnight market can quote you long odds on a $10 order and something far worse on a $1,000 order. Headline vig means little when you are the only bid.
The oldest caution carries over word for word. Most people lose, the same as in DFS when I deposited in 2014, and no fee structure fixes the math for a player without an edge.
So am I still playing DFS?
Yes. Camps are opening as I write this and my drafts start within weeks. My mistake in 2025 was sizing up the category from a distance instead of checking whether it shared a skeleton with the game I’d been defending for a decade. The structure underneath, from the peer-to-peer counterparties to the honest rake to a winner’s standing invitation to keep showing up, is the one I’ve trusted my bankroll to since 2014. I see no reason to choose between them.
What we’re building
PredictQ is now live. It’s built for anyone who follows prediction markets, with everything from beginner guides to analysis of the week’s biggest boards, and more tools arriving as we build. I’ll be writing here regularly. Whatever brought you to these markets, come see what we’ve got.