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.
Kalshi’s esports markets traded $231.8 million across 4.05 million individual trades in June 2026, spread across 28 distinct series covering seven titles. With the danger of sounding like I’m flogging a dead horse, the $231.8 million traded does not equal total money risked, such is the nature of prediction markets.
The more interesting one is this: 57% of it, $132.1 million, was a small cluster of Counter-Strike 2 markets, and a good chunk of that ran through one week in the middle of the month, when IEM Cologne was live. I previously broke down IEM Cologne’s Kalshi data here .
There’s a clear market leader in what people are trading in June, and the answer’s clearly Counter-Strike. 59% of every esports contract traded on Kalshi in June 2026 was on Counter-Strike 2 . This was almost entirely single-match betting (made up of game winner, map winner and total-maps markets), plus a small slice on the tournament-outright market.
No other title cracked 12% of the month’s volume, and the sheer dominance was particularly pronounced at IEM Cologne in the third week.
League of Legends Game Winner was a distant second at 11.6% of the month ($26.8 million), with Valorant’s game-winner market close behind at 8.7% ($20.1 million). Between them, CS2’s single-match betting, LoL’s game market and Valorant’s game market accounted for 77% of everything traded on Kalshi’s esports board in June. It goes to show that when there’s a major Counter-Strike event on, it swallows the competition. Whether or not that changes in July with LoL’s MSI taking place remains to be seen.
It’s worth breaking such a substantial number down. CS2, broadly speaking, isn’t just one market on Kalshi. It can be split into five. These are whether a team wins the match; whether it wins a given map; whether the match goes over or under a total-maps line; whether a team qualifies for the next stage of a tournament; and, separately, who wins the whole event outright. Nearly four-fifths of CS2’s entire monthly volume, $103.8 million, sat in the single “who wins the match” market alone. Map winner markets added another 20% ($26.9 million).
The tournament comfortably produced pretty much all of the top ten biggest markets, and stealing a table I made for the IEM Cologne analysis, the match-level wagering generally followed the tournament progression.
Falcons were involved in the top three traded markets. This can simply be explained by the magnitude of the eventual winners’ contests with the two teams tipped to win it all pre-tournament in Team Spirit and Team Vitality.
One match would break into the top ten, sitting just above 9z vs FURIA outside of…