Dead cat bounce
OSB top two’s shares still mired despite predictions developments
Regulatory uncertainty doesn’t play out as DraftKings and Flutter might have hoped.
In +More: Sportradar launches into iCasino provision.
Peaks+Troughs: Truist on the trading environment in Las Vegas.
Venture playground: Gambly and Unabated announce a merger.
Hard Rock Bet is growing – we know you know! And we want to bring in some more maestros to make beautiful music in our Sportsbook. You need to be among the very best in the industry to be considered for these roles. Are you up to it?
Anemic
Is that all there is? DraftKings and Flutter Entertainment’s shares saw only low single-digit rises on Monday, despite the supposedly good news about Kalshi being temporarily barred in Nevada and a bipartisan effort being launched in Congress that placed the future of sports predictions in doubt.
Pre-open trading on Monday suggested the pair were due a near double-digit boost on what appeared a worsening backdrop for the pure-play predictions providers.
However, despite opening sharply up, the enthusiasm diminished as the day progressed, with DraftKings ending the day up just over 1% and Flutter managing a barely more respectable 4% uplift.
Monday’s reaction: If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing
I had the feeling that something was missing: JP Morgan said the news about a bipartisan congressional effort would be good for both standalone online brands as well as brands tied to B&M gaming entities.
However, investors appeared to be far from clear that DraftKings and Flutter are destined to be unalloyed winners from any uncertainty over the status of sports predictions.
DraftKings is down over 45% in the last six months, leaving the company worth just $11.5bn.
Flutter has suffered an even worse decline, off by over 60% in the last six months and down to a market cap of $18.9bn.
Fair of face: Enjoying a better Monday was Entain, which enjoyed an 8% uplift that the analysts at Deutsche Bank ascribed to the news on predictions over the weekend.
The team added that while the bill in Congress “has a long way to go before/if” sports-based prediction markets are banned, it is “encouraging” that the bill has federal momentum.
Smoke gets in your eyes: Further supportive commentary for the leading OSB books came from Citizens on Monday, which suggested the “vast majority” of the field of competitors in the prediction markets space was “just smoke and mirrors.”
The team said new entrants from the gaming, fintech, media and brokerages sectors “appear to enter the market daily.”
Citizens went on to suggest this resembles the initial post-PASPA rush to market in the OSB space when, by their count, 68 brands entered the race.
Of these, they said only 31 are still operational while the top eight now control 98% of the OSB market and 90% of iCasino.
The shake of things to come: While some of the names that have entered the predictions space are “notable” – including Robinhood, Coinbase and Gemini – the Citizens team argued that the “greatest chance to disrupt the industry is through a new innovative product offering.”
Prediction markets, they suggested, “do not offer a superior offering in the current industry format, other than having better cash out compared to traditional sportsbooks.”
“In the near term, we do not expect Robinhood or Kalshi to lose market share,” they added.
But they do believe a “large spending campaign” from the predictions space at the start of the 2026 NFL season would “dislodge market share around the industry.”
The Citizens analysts said that “ultimately” they see DraftKings and FanDuel as the “main competitors” to the prediction markets incumbents – Kalshi and Polymarket – with “decades of operational experience in the betting industry, while many attempting to compete will fail.”
Longer term, the team argued that sports-betting legalization in new states will put a ceiling on the TAM.
This will make it “increasingly difficult for an abundance of prediction market operators to compete in those respective states.”
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+More
Sportradar has launched Playradar, a new iCasino brand offering a fully integrated, cross-vertical gaming ecosystem aimed at global operators. The rollout includes hybrid products combining live sports data, streaming and casino mechanics, alongside virtual sports and traditional games. Former Playtech Live CEO Edo Haitin will lead the division. See the comments from CFO Craig Felenstein at the Roth investor conference below.
IGT is to cut around 700 jobs globally, or roughly 10% of its workforce, as it continues integrating operations following its merger with Everi. Incoming CEO Hector Fernandez said the move is not performance related but aimed at aligning resources, reducing duplication and streamlining the business. The layoffs follow Apollo-backed consolidation efforts, with IGT stating the restructuring positions the combined gaming and digital group for future growth.
Gaming REIT VICI Properties is continuing to diversify away from the sector after it announced it had significantly expanded its mezzanine load for the One Beverly Hills development to $1.5bn from its previous $450m commitment. The deal extends VICI’s strategic partnership with developers Cain and Eldridge Industries.
Bet365 is the latest OSB operator to leave the AGA, according to InGame, following in the wake of the departures of FanDuel, DraftKings and Fanatics, which each left due to the incompatibility of membership with their prediction market ambitions. Bet365 is yet to indicate why it has left, sparking speculation about its own prediction market ambitions.
E+M PRO
What it says on the tin: Inspired Entertainment’s CEO Brooks Pierce tells E+M PRO the thesis for transforming the business – sell the low-margin assets, improve margins, invest in scalable content – is compounding as advertised.
See the Earnings Debrief edition sent to PRO subscribers yesterday.
Earnings in brief
ZEAL Network: FY25 revenue rose 16% to €218.5m with EBITDA up 11% to €68.8m, despite a softer jackpot environment. Growth was driven by its core lottery business, where monthly active users increased 8% to 1.56 million, alongside strong traction in newer verticals. The Dream House Raffle generated €38.9m in billings while games revenue rose 46%.
Sportradar @ Roth conference
A game of patience: Sportradar CFO Craig Felenstein used his Roth Capital Partners appearance yesterday to insist that prediction markets should be viewed as being purely positive.
“For us as an organization, we view it only as an opportunity,” he told analysts, pointing to the sheer number of potential clients compared to the concentrated domestic OSB market.
Felenstein broke the prediction markets ecosystem into three distinct customer tiers – exchanges, brokers and market makers – each requiring tailored product solutions.
Market makers, he noted, need low-latency live data to manage risk, while exchanges want fan acquisition and engagement tools.
In league with: The MLB/Polymarket deal announced last week was held up as a watershed moment. Felenstein confirmed that MLB included Sportradar’s official data partner status as part of that announcement and signaled similar arrangements were imminent with the NBA and NHL, for which Sportradar is also the official data partner.
Crucially, he revealed the leagues themselves are now mandating that prediction market operators work with Sportradar – a significant commercial tailwind.
“We want to continue to work with our sports partners,” he said “That has really been the only thing that’s been holding us back here with regards to the prediction markets over the last several months.”
He characterized league alignment as the primary bottleneck now being resolved.
Play for today: On the launch of Playradar announced yesterday, Felenstein said the logic into the iCasino arena was straightforward: 70-80% of Sportradar’s 800 sportsbook partners already have an iGaming component, making cross-sell a natural play.
He insisted that this won’t be a big-spend land grab. “You’re not gonna see us lower our overall margins because of this investment, but we’ll incrementalize our way in over time.”
The iGaming market was cited at over $100bn and Sportradar believes its unique position straddling live sports data and streaming gives it an angle nobody else currently occupies.
Peaks+Troughs
Split personality: After meeting with various Vegas management teams, the analysts at Truist reported one executive using the phrase “the peaks are getting higher and the troughs are getting lower” to describe the schizophrenic nature of the market.
In between days: The team said that while peak events were showing strong demand, the lulls in between were “softer than ever.”
But the analysts remained confident that the sequential trends were improving. The team pointed out that last summer Vegas saw a return of seasonality following the somewhat abnormal boom period post-pandemic.
“Comps now ease into summertime and we think there are lots of programming planned to address the low-end softness,” they added.
This includes what the team believes will be another value campaign on the part of the visitors authority, as was undertaken late last year to some degree of success.
But they cautioned that “there’s always a risk of increasing occupancy at the expense of rate to drive what could ultimately be a lower-quality customer that isn’t all that additive.”
Strictly business: Truist said they met with the management at Caesars but that the discussions were “strictly limited to Vegas operating trends.”
But it didn’t stop them commenting on the prospects of a buyout, saying that Caesars’ “sizable” leverage profile and regional lease coverage highlighted some of the complexities in any transaction.
They added there are “multiple ways” that Caesars “could be looking to engineer value.”
“We think any transaction here to take advantage of lingering valuation dislocation could be the first of many.”
If mobile’s the star, then desktop is the often-forgotten oldest child. Ahem — platform.
GeoComply’s data shows that even a fraction of traffic can carry a lot of weight. In U.S. iCasino, desktop (browser or app) drives nearly half of revenue — and that’s just the start of the story.
Based on network-wide analysis across the largest footprint in regulated U.S. iGaming, the data reveals who’s really playing on desktop, what their value looks like, how it supports mobile conversion — and why common assumptions around UX and fraud don’t quite hold up.
Dig into the full breakdown in their latest blog: Small, but Mighty: The Hidden Value of Desktop in iGaming.
Venture playground
Funding news
Nights on Broadway: Canada-based performance marketing firm 23 Broadway has closed a $3m seed round to launch an integrated user acquisition financing platform, combining non-dilutive capital with its proprietary AI system and performance marketing expertise.
The round was co-led by Betty and Will Ventures, with participation from 359 Capital, CEAS Investments and Dave Bartman.
23 Broadway had previously played a significant role in growing Canadian operator Betty to an 18% market share in Ontario.
On the map: Central to the platform is Atlas, 23 Broadway’s proprietary AI system that calculates the optimal cost of customer acquisition alongside predicted long-term value, enabling more efficient capital deployment across advertising ecosystems, including Google Ads.
CEO Jordan Tuch said the model is designed to help growth-stage businesses scale without building their own technology or marketing infrastructure.
Proceeds will fund further Atlas development, enhanced predictive modeling, new AI-driven retention marketing tools for gaming companies, and the onboarding of additional partners.
In focus – Gambly Ventures
Investment grade: Gambly and Unabated have announced the formation of Gambly Ventures, a merger that brings together AI-powered bet placement technology with professional-grade betting analytics in a deal aimed at serving the full spectrum of the sports-wagering market.
The two companies were already operating as close partners before the deal, and both brands will continue as separate offerings targeting different bettor profiles.
Gambly caters to casual and mainstream bettors through a ChatGPT-style interface that lets users move from a betting idea to a placed wager in seconds.
The platform has amassed more than 200,000 users who have saved its number for betslips via text, with over 2,700 Discord servers relying on the service for deep links.
Gambly delivered nearly 15 million betslips to operators during the most recent NFL season alone.
Spears of destiny: Gambly was co-founded by Cal Spears and Jonathan Bales, DFS veterans via RotoGrinders and FantasyLabs. Spears will serve as CEO of the merged entity, while Bales takes the role of chief strategy officer.
Unabated was co-founded by six industry figures including Jack Andrews and sharp betting luminary Rufus Peabody.
The platform helps serious bettors identify pricing inefficiencies and evaluate markets with precision.
The merged entity will share infrastructure across odds ingestion, betslip deep linking and data science, while each brand maintains its distinct product identity.
Spears pointed to expanding prediction markets and operators preparing to enter more than 20 new states as key growth catalysts.
“After a few challenging years for the affiliate industry, the opportunity ahead is being underestimated,” he said.
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Upcoming earnings
Mar 26: Banijay strategic update
Mar 30: Gaming Realms
Mar 31: Bally’s Intralot
Soft2Bet Evaluates Alberta Market Entry to Strengthen Canadian Footprint
Soft2Bet has announced its intention to enter the Alberta iGaming market, pending regulatory approval. Leveraging success from its Ontario brand, ToonieBet, the company eyes a market projected to exceed $700 million at maturity. Soft2Bet is currently preparing for technical requirements under the iGaming Alberta Act, overseen by the AiGC and AGLC.
“We are committed to delivering localized, engaging experiences that reflect the unique preferences of each market,” said David Yatom Hay, General Counsel, Soft2Bet.
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