Legal Sports Betting Made the Terry Rozier Scandal Possible
Terry Rozier and the Teleprompt Operator
The Terry Rozier indictment shows how legal sports betting enables insider scams that illegal bookies would have rejected. As legal handle grew from $4.8 billion to over $160 billion, sportsbooks could absorb six-figure bets on a single player's stats—something an illegal bookie would never take. The same logic applies to prediction markets: a White House teleprompter operator won $100,000 betting on Trump's speech words, a new form of insider trading that didn't exist before Kalshi. If prediction markets don't self-regulate, they'll face backlash alongside sports gambling.
While legal sports betting makes match-fixing easier, prediction markets are making entirely new forms of insider betting viable.
- 01284a7e
"This is frustrating to admit, because prediction markets can be societally useful: it is important to have good forecasts on federal government shutdowns, landfall of hurricanes in the Southeast, and traffic through the Strait of Hormuz"...
Prediction markets do not provide good forecasts, and are in no way "societally useful".
- solidasparagus
It feels like this article is trying to have it both ways. It claims that the Terry Rozier bet wouldn't be viable in pre-2017 because people who be savvy enough to notice the weird bet and retaliate. But in the legal market, the odd bet was noticed immediately, prop bets on Rozier were shut down before tipoff, and there was a federal investigation into it.
It's a weird claim to act like the legal market enabled a successful bet that the prior illegal market would have stopped.
- joezydeco
Nothing wrong with a little frontrunning. Ask any HFT firm how do to it right.