Utah has sued prediction market operator Kalshi in state court, arguing that its sports, election and other event contracts amount to illegal gambling and constitute a public nuisance under state law.

Attorney General Derek Brown announced the 63-page lawsuit on Tuesday 20 October. It was filed in the 3rd District Court in Salt Lake City and names Kalshi, KalshiEx, Kalshi Klear and Kalshi Trading, along with market maker Susquehanna International Group and Susquehanna Government Products, according to the Deseret News.

What Utah is asking for

The state wants the court to stop Kalshi operating in Utah, including by requiring a court-approved geolocation provider to block sports, election, politics, culture and “mention” contracts for users in the state. It is also seeking restitution and the disgorgement of profits.

Based on Kalshi’s fee of one to two cents per contract, the state estimates that the company earned between $30.5m and $61.1m from Utah accounts. The complaint says more than 32,000 Utah residents had verified Kalshi accounts as of February 2026, and that Utah bettors lost at least $5.5m.

The suit alleges that Kalshi began offering contracts to Utah residents by September 2024 at the latest, advertised itself as “legal in all 50 states”, and had a representative film an advert on the Brigham Young University campus. The Salt Lake Tribune reported that the state describes Kalshi as “the manager of a back-alley gambling den”.

“Frankly, they are engineered to do one thing and one thing alone, and that is to empty your wallet,” Brown said when announcing the case.

Kalshi’s response

Kalshi maintains that it is a federally regulated derivatives exchange overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and that state gambling law does not apply to its contracts. Spokesperson Jacki McGavick said the company answers to federal law and that the state action does not affect its ongoing federal litigation, adding that “no single state should have a veto” over a national market.

The two sides are already in federal court. Kalshi sued Utah in February, pre-emptively seeking to block enforcement of the state’s gambling laws against its sports contracts. In August, US District Judge Robert Shelby ruled that Utah’s anti-gambling laws apply to those contracts and that the federal Commodity Exchange Act does not pre-empt state enforcement.

A widening front

Utah also joined 40 other states and the District of Columbia earlier this year in a letter to the CFTC arguing that the federal regulator lacks jurisdiction over sports wagering offered through prediction markets. Governor Spencer Cox has described the contracts as gambling “pure and simple”.

Utah is one of only two US states that prohibit all forms of gambling, and its leaders have been among the most vocal opponents of sports event contracts. At least nine states have now brought legal action against prediction market platforms, most of it civil, although Arizona has filed a criminal complaint.

The Utah filing comes in the same week that Polymarket sued Ohio over its crackdown on sports event contracts, and against a split in the federal courts. A federal judge blocked Illinois from applying its gambling rules to Kalshi earlier this month, while 39 states have urged the Supreme Court to take up New Jersey’s case against the company.

Kalshi chief executive Tarek Mansour told Reuters this week that the dispute could end up before the Supreme Court. By moving in state court on public nuisance and restitution grounds, Utah is testing a route that, if it succeeds, other states could copy without waiting for that ruling.

Polymarket’s US exchange has filed a federal lawsuit against Ohio officials, seeking to block the state from enforcing its sports gambling laws against the prediction market’s sports event contracts.

QCX LLC, which trades as Polymarket US, filed the complaint on 16 October in the US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. The case, numbered 2:26-cv-01502, has been assigned to Judge Douglas R. Cole. The defendants, all sued in their official capacities, are the state attorney general, Ohio Casino Control Commission (OCCC) interim executive director Andromeda Morrison and the commission’s seven members.

Filed on the deadline

The filing landed on the same day as the deadline the OCCC had set in its cease-and-desist letters. On 2 October the commission ordered ten prediction markets and brokers to stop offering sports contracts in the state and to confirm compliance in writing within 14 days.

According to the complaint, as summarised in court reporting, the letters threatened administrative, civil, nuisance or criminal action and a civil penalty equal to the money obtained from offering the contracts in Ohio. Polymarket said that left it with two bad options: keep operating and risk enforcement, or cut off Ohio users and unwind their open positions.

A protectionism argument

Alongside the now-familiar federal pre-emption claim, Polymarket is leaning on a second line of attack. It argues that Ohio’s sports betting regime discriminates against out-of-state businesses because Type A online sports gaming licences are available only to applicants with an Ohio place of business or an in-state sports gaming facility.

The complaint also points to licensing criteria that favour local presence and economic contribution, a cap of 25 proprietors, in-state server requirements and the restriction of betting to people physically in Ohio. Polymarket describes the structure as unlawful protectionism that burdens interstate commerce.

On pre-emption, the company says the CFTC designated it a contract market in July 2025 and that federal law gives the agency exclusive jurisdiction over swaps traded on such markets. It cites the CFTC’s 9 October interim final rule defining event contracts as swaps, and argues that the Sixth Circuit’s 25 September ruling against Kalshi, which the OCCC relied on, pre-dated that federal action and remains open to rehearing and Supreme Court review.

Polymarket wants a declaration that the relevant parts of Ohio’s criminal, nuisance and casino codes are unconstitutional and pre-empted as applied to its platform, along with preliminary and permanent injunctions.

The company is represented by Squire Patton Boggs and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, according to court reporting.

Ohio holds its line

State officials show no sign of backing down. Governor Mike DeWine has described the products as “pure and simple gambling”, according to the Ohio Capital Journal, which also reported that most of the ten platforms that received letters were still offering sports markets after the deadline passed. The commission told the outlet that Plus500US had agreed to stop.

The suit adds Ohio to a lengthening list of state fights. In the past week alone, Underdog sued Tennessee over a similar cease-and-desist, and Crypto.com and Novig took Missouri to court.

What comes next

A ruling on preliminary relief will be closely watched because the Southern District of Ohio is bound by the Sixth Circuit’s Kalshi decision. If Judge Cole declines to distinguish the CFTC’s new rule, Polymarket’s commerce clause argument may become the more important test, with implications for every state that ties sports betting licences to a local footprint.

Flutter Entertainment, the owner of Paddy Power, Betfair and Sky Bet, plans to cut up to 1,400 jobs in its UK and Ireland (UKI) business as it responds to the steep rise in British gaming taxes announced in last year’s Autumn Budget.

The company said on 20 October that the redundancies form part of a restructuring of the UKI division and are subject to consultation. Flutter employs around 28,500 people globally, about 9,000 of them in the UK and Ireland, meaning the plan could affect roughly one in six of the division’s staff.

Leeds and Dublin in the firing line

According to Flutter’s announcement, the roles affected are based in Leeds and Dublin, along with UK and Ireland staff working from the group’s hubs in Porto, Portugal, and Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Leeds is the historic home of Sky Bet, while Dublin hosts Paddy Power and Flutter’s Irish operations.

The company did not give a timeline for the consultation process but said restructuring costs of between $80m and $90m would be booked in the fourth quarter of 2026. Those costs sit within the $500m of restructuring, transaction and integration costs already included in the guidance it raised at its second-quarter results.

The tax bill behind the cuts

Flutter tied the decision directly to the 2025 Budget, which raised the duty on online casino gaming by 19 percentage points to 40% from April 2026. A further 10-point increase, taking the duty on remote sports betting (excluding horseracing) to 25%, follows in April 2027.

The group estimates the iGaming tax changes alone will cost it $540m of adjusted EBITDA in 2027, of which it expects to offset $201m through what it calls first-order mitigation. The UKI restructuring is part of that response. Flutter also argued that cutting fixed costs would protect investment in its customer offer and help it win share in a market it expects to be reshaped by the higher duties.

Kevin Harrington, chief executive of Flutter UK and Ireland, said his “immediate focus is providing the necessary support for all of our impacted colleagues.” He added: “As we warned a year ago, we cannot fully absorb a rise of this magnitude without reducing our fixed cost base.”

The scale of the cuts is notable given Flutter’s position as the largest operator in the UK and Ireland. Its brands span retail, online sports betting and online casino, and the company has spent several years consolidating them onto shared technology platforms, which gives it more room than smaller rivals to remove duplicated roles.

Early test for new leadership

The announcement is one of the first major decisions under Dan Taylor, who took over as group chief executive on 1 October after Peter Jackson stepped down. Taylor previously ran Flutter International.

The cuts drew wide coverage on Tuesday, with the BBC, Reuters and Racing Post all reporting the story, and the trade press framing it as the clearest sign yet of the Budget’s impact on employment in the sector.

Pressure ahead of the next Budget

The timing is pointed. Chancellor John Healey delivers his Autumn Budget on 28 October, and the industry is already lobbying against further rises. The Betting and Gaming Council warned this month that doubling Machine Games Duty could cost 16,000 jobs, while 90 Labour MPs have urged the Chancellor to do exactly that for high-stake Category B machines.

Flutter’s move gives the industry a concrete figure to put in front of the Treasury. Whether it shifts the debate will become clear next week.