DraftKings, FanDuel and Fanatics have begun withdrawing their prediction market products from Utah, days after the state’s attorney general filed criminal charges against Kalshi and its two co-founders. The three sportsbook operators are the first major US betting brands to retreat from a state over the event contracts fight, while Kalshi and Polymarket have kept their markets live.

DraftKings Predictions removed sports, politics and novelty contracts for Utah customers late on Wednesday 28 October. FanDuel Predicts followed at 10am ET on Friday 30 October, and Fanatics Markets said it will stop accepting trades in the state on Wednesday 4 November. The moves were first reported by Legal Sports Report and SBC Americas.

Different scopes of withdrawal

The three exits are not identical. DraftKings said that “effective immediately, sports, novelty, political, and certain other event contracts are no longer available”, but Utah users can still trade financial contracts tied to stocks, commodities and crypto prices. FanDuel said “event contracts on sports, politics, and novelties will no longer be available to customers in Utah”, leaving economic benchmark and financial indicator markets in place. Both companies said existing positions will remain open and settle as normal.

Fanatics is going further and ending every event contract it offers in the state. “Due to recent developments, we are stopping trade placement on Fanatics Markets in the state of Utah on November 4,” a spokesperson said.

The timing matters for the operators’ wider prediction market strategies. All three launched event contract products this year as a way to reach customers in states without legal sports betting, and Utah was one of the clearest examples of that strategy: a state where no form of sports wagering is permitted under state law.

Underdog still listed Utah as an available region for its prediction markets as of Friday and did not respond to requests for comment, according to Legal Sports Report.

Criminal case against Kalshi

The retreat follows Utah Attorney General Derek Brown’s decision last week to file criminal charges against Kalshi and co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara. The 14 counts include a second-degree felony charge of pattern of unlawful activity for each founder and 12 third-degree felony counts of online gambling promotion. The charges are allegations and have not been tested in court.

According to the state, an undercover investigator opened a Kalshi account from a Utah IP address and placed 12 sports event contract trades between 13 and 26 September in Salt Lake and Davis counties, with each trade generating a fee.

“Gambling is illegal in Utah, whether you place the bet, run the game, or promote it,” Brown said. Kalshi called the charges “a crazy overreach” and said “Utah is clearly playing politics”.

The criminal case came on top of the state’s civil action, in which Utah sued Kalshi in state court as a public nuisance. Utah is one of only two US states with no legal form of gambling.

Federal pushback

The dispute is also being fought at federal level. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Department of Justice have sued Utah to block its crackdown, arguing that event contracts listed on CFTC-regulated exchanges fall under exclusive federal jurisdiction. Kalshi has taken its own preemption argument to the Tenth Circuit after losing at district court level.

For the licensed sportsbook groups, the calculation is different from that of the prediction-market-only platforms. DraftKings, FanDuel and Fanatics hold state gaming licences across dozens of US jurisdictions and have more to lose from a criminal confrontation with a state attorney general than Kalshi or Polymarket, whose businesses rest almost entirely on the federal preemption argument.

The withdrawals give Utah an early practical win while the federal cases proceed, and other states weighing enforcement against prediction markets are likely to take note of how quickly the regulated operators stepped back.

India’s Supreme Court has dismissed review petitions led by Flutter-owned Junglee Games against its May ruling that upheld Tamil Nadu and Karnataka’s bans on online games played for stakes, closing off one of the industry’s remaining routes to restore state-level protection for skill-based real-money gaming.

A bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan rejected the petitions in an order dated 15 October that was published on the court’s website on 26 October. The court condoned the delay in filing but declined oral hearings and decided the matter on the papers, finding no grounds to revisit its judgment. Several connected review petitions from other gaming companies were disposed of in the same order.

Who challenged the ruling

The lead case was Junglee Games India Pvt Ltd v State of Tamil Nadu and others. Alongside Junglee, review petitions were filed by Games24x7 and Head Digital Works, and by industry bodies the All India Gaming Federation and the Federation of Indian Fantasy Sports, according to reporting by Gambling.com.

The petitioners argued that games of skill form a separate class from games of chance and fall outside the powers of state governments to ban.

What the May judgment held

The court’s judgment of 27 May reversed earlier decisions of the Madras High Court, which had struck down Tamil Nadu’s amendment, and the Karnataka High Court, which had quashed that state’s ban.

It held that once money is staked, the activity amounts to gambling regardless of the skill involved, and that betting and gambling sit outside protected commerce, so no fundamental right to carry them on can be claimed. It also found that states can legislate on public order grounds where online real-money games cause harm, and that the two laws were supported by empirical evidence.

That reasoning was a significant setback for the Indian real-money gaming sector, which for years had relied on the distinction between skill and chance to operate rummy, poker and fantasy products in most states.

Little practical change, but a door closes

The dismissal has limited immediate commercial effect because federal law has already shut the market. The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act received presidential assent on 22 August 2025 and bans online money games nationwide, including those offered from outside India. Junglee stopped real-money operations in the country the same day.

Before the Act, Flutter had expected India to contribute around $200m in revenue and $50m in adjusted EBITDA in 2025, and Junglee employed more than 1,100 people.

What the review order does is remove the possibility that the state bans might be struck down if the national law were later diluted or overturned. Challenges to the Online Gaming Act itself are being heard separately and are unaffected by the order. A curative petition, an exceptional remedy the court grants only on narrow grounds, is the only step left in the state-ban proceedings.

Wider implications

For international operators and suppliers that once viewed India as one of the largest untapped real-money markets, the combination of a national ban and a Supreme Court ruling that skill does not shield staked games from gambling laws means any reopening would need new legislation rather than a court victory.

The outcome also strengthens the hand of other state governments that may want to legislate against online gaming in future, regardless of what happens to the federal Act.

The Netherlands’ licensed gambling market shrank to €4.1bn in gross gaming revenue in 2025, down from €4.5bn a year earlier, as online casino and sports betting revenue fell sharply, according to the Kansspelautoriteit’s annual market scan published on 29 October.

The regulator said plainly that the licensed Dutch market contracted in 2025 and that the decline was driven mainly by the online segment. Its market scan was released alongside a half-yearly monitoring report on online gambling covering the first six months of 2026.

Online leads the fall

Online casino gross gaming revenue fell 18.2% year on year, while online sports betting dropped 30.2%, according to the Ksa figures. Land-based gaming machines in arcades and hospitality venues slipped 4.7% and lotteries were down 1.8%.

The only major segment to grow was Holland Casino, the state-owned land-based operator, which posted a 2.8% increase. The regulator said that growth came from slot machines rather than table games.

The figures add to a run of difficult data for licensed operators in the Netherlands, who have faced higher gaming tax and a steady tightening of duty-of-care and advertising rules since the market opened in October 2021. Industry groups have repeatedly warned that the combination is pushing players towards unlicensed sites.

Channelisation edges up

The Ksa’s monitoring report offers a slightly more positive picture for the first half of 2026. The regulator estimates that channelisation measured by gross gaming revenue rose from 54% in the second half of 2025 to 59% in the first half of 2026. By player numbers the picture is stronger: around 94% of people who gamble do so only with licensed providers, it said.

The gap between those two measures reflects the Ksa’s finding that players who use illegal sites appear to lose considerably more on average than those who stay with licensed operators. The regulator did not publish an estimate of the size of the illegal market.

The number of online gambling accounts with licensed operators rose to 1.48 million at the end of the first half of 2026, from 1.38 million six months earlier. The Ksa estimates that around 490,000 people gamble online each month, and that about 820,000 placed at least one online bet or wager during the half year.

Harm indicators mixed

On player protection, the report cites addiction treatment data showing that the number of people in treatment for gambling problems rose by more than 14% in 2025 compared with 2024. Separate Ipsos research commissioned for the monitor found that 65% of online gamblers play without problems, unchanged from 2025. The high-risk group was stable, the low-risk group grew and the moderate-risk group shrank.

Full figures are available in the Ksa’s overview of the Dutch gambling market, which links to the underlying market scan and monitoring reports.

Enforcement remains the priority

The data comes a week after the regulator hit EOD Code with a record €37m fine over twelve illegal casino sites, and as it continues to press licensed operators on specific practices, including when it confronted 711 over wagering conditions on deposits. The Ksa has said tackling the illegal market is its top priority five years after online gambling was legalised.

For licensed operators, a market that is smaller in revenue terms but slightly better channelised will sharpen the debate over whether the current tax and regulatory settings are sustainable, particularly with online sports betting revenue down by almost a third in a single year.