Ollie swapped the abacus for Sonic on the SEGA Mega Drive at neighbor Frank's house at an early age and has never looked back. With thousands of hours in Dota 2 (and no ability to show for it), he still clings on to the hope that one day, he will replicate Natus Vincere at gamescom 14 years ago and lift the Aegis of Champions. Ollie has been at the intersection of video games, esports, and gambling for over ten years and has also worked in consultancy in the gambling industry. Ollie's work can be found on the likes of: BBC, Red Bull Gaming, Esports Insider, CasinoBeats, PC Gamer, Green Man Gaming as well as his own thought-leadership substack "Esprouts" looking at specific studies and stories where games meet gambling.
On Kalshi, in no month prior to October 2025 did esports contracts trade more than $0.4 million. In August 2026, they peaked at $391 million on the platform . In the twelve months to September, esports volume on the platform totalled $1.73 billion.
It’s a small part of a vastly larger machine, but it’s enough to show that interest in esports still exists — despite what the naysayers may tell you.
If we replace the Chinese Zodiac signs with gambling-buzzwords, 2026 is well and truly the year of the Prediction Market. Prior signs may include: NFTs, crypto, online poker, sweepstakes, social casino. The list could increase ad infinitum. If I were a trader, I’d be trading yes for “rip pulls” to be 2027’s hot topic.
If you’re in or around the gambling industry, then you’ll be well accustomed to literally only reading about Kalshi, Polymarket, and the growing gaggle of operators vying for a slice of the pie. They’re vying for a slice in between being sued by state gambling regulators, suing state gambling regulators, and largely doing whatever they want because of the frankly bonkers regulatory system over in the United States.
Still, prediction markets data is available via API, and if you’ve got time and a decent grasp of what you’re looking for, it can provide some interesting takeaways and signals. They’re not as ironclad a “truth” signal as Donald Trump Jr. will have you believe, but they still throw up data, and data is certainly helpful for interpreting consumer behaviour.
The platform’s first esports offering in autumn 2025 was a single “who will win League of Legends Worlds” market. This fits our data pull: League of Legends made up almost all of the $5.2 million traded in October 2025.
Single-match markets followed across Counter-Strike 2, League of Legends, Valorant and Dota 2, and volume has climbed almost every month since. The platform traded $44 million of esports in the fourth quarter of 2025, $173 million in the first quarter of 2026, $549 million in the second and $967 million in the third.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that volume spikes with the biggest events. This was shown with the mammoth trading volume on soccer during the FIFA World Cup. In esports, it seems that the trend is not dissimilar, although I would suggest there is strong underlying growth, complemented by spikes around major events.
June included the IEM Cologne Major (Counter-Strike). August had the Esports World Cup (CS Finals) and Dota 2’s The International. The combination of two large events in August produced the peak, and North America’s love of Counter-Strike meant that June produced impre…