Not just bars, but restaurants. Places you might take a date for nice Italian food have little corners with digital slots. Gas stations, Taco joints, sometimes an entire business in a strip mall dedicated to digital slots.
It's insane. The only place like it I'd seen prior to a some years back was Nevada. Businesses must be making crazy money off of them to be so prolific in putting them in, and that money comes from somewhere (i.e. not likely to be casual players).
That said, I actually played one at a restaurant while waiting for a carry out order and it ended up killing some time and paying for our meal that day. The impending downfall of society paid off for me that afternoon.
- it has the semi-respectable veneer of something that normal people have done throughout human history
- it has completely parasitized existing sports media to target new users in ways that aren't available for other topics
- some variant of 'sports' is happening 24/7/365 with enough prop bet granularity to capture the full attention and disposable income of addicts. There's an ongoing controversy with a star college football quarterback who was going to MLB games to place bets on every single individual pitch.
You can basically think of gambling addicts as a finite resource that these different companies are competing for. Many people get addicted to lootbox/gacha games at an early age, and even larger portion are already deep in sports gambling. The target demo for non-sports prediction markets roughly matches to people in earlier times who got into commodities futures or optimal strategies for casino games (which clearly existed but never at a scale to rival what we see with sports betting right now).
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/may/16/how-b...
"Hudson also redeemed 489 gambling inducements, including 302 from Sportsbet and 72 from Bet365, the court heard – likely to be an underestimate of what was offered to him."
"On multiple occasions, Gray said, Hudson withdrew all the funds from his gambling accounts, and did not bet or deposit again until he received a deposit match inducement."
He opened his first gambling account literally on his 18th birthday. He had gambling accounts with five different bookies. His behaviour triggered alerts at the bookies dozens of times.
I am still very, very anti prediction market, to be clear. But that is one reason why I would agree with a soft statement like "prediction markets are less harmful than sports betting" (in much the same way that a handgun is less harmful than a fully automatic rifle).
Second, while yes, some of the markets available on prediction markets can push people to do awful things, there are plenty that are harmless. I'm cherry picking to make an extreme point, but I would so much rather have someone betting on what the temperature in Los Angeles is going to be tomorrow on Kalshi than betting on who will win the little league world series on DraftKings.
I support regulation saying certain things should not be allowed to be bet on, but allowing bets on morally questionable things isn't a quality unique to prediction markets.
How? They sell contracts between two users. One side each. Completely different from a sportsbook where users are betting that the lines they set are not correct.
If you are saying Kalshi isn't a sportsbook because the house isn't on the other side of the bet, you might as well argue that DraftKings isn't a sportsbook because they don't actually track your wagers in a book.