Unpredictable Consumer Protection: What Difference a Year Makes

When sports betting was legalized in 2018, Indian Country was in a difficult bind. How can tribes get involved while addressing the tribal-state compacts. And then prediction markets upended the world. San Diego State Professor Dr. Katherine Spilde says the Supreme Court needs to bring some sanity to the marketplace.

In August, 2025, my San Diego State colleague Brandon Mastromartino and I wrote an academic paper comparing the regulatory models for legal sports betting in Indian Country. Our research was published in Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, a premier journal in our field, and its aim was to clarify how tribes operationalize sports wagering under varying compact requirements to support tribal economic empowerment.

While the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) provides a federal framework, each tribal-state compact represents different legal choices—such as limiting wagering to on-reservation casinos, allowing or prohibiting mobile betting, or setting revenue-sharing terms in exchange for retained tribal exclusivity.

Our study’s findings on the range of sports betting compact terms were intended to provide guidance for policymakers in states that were contemplating the extent to which tribes should have the option to offer exclusive operations or to compete with commercial sportsbooks.

Our intention for this work was to empower tribes, regulators, and legislators alike to formulate policies that could uphold tribal sovereignty while fostering transparency, protecting consumers, and aligning sports wagering opportunities with broader community values and strategic economic goals.

Tribal Options

As our overview demonstrated, tribal exclusivity in sports wagering emerged in three states because the tribe has negotiated a compact that conferred exclusive rights, often in exchange for some portion of gaming revenues. Where states opted not to legalize commercial sports betting, some tribes assumed de facto monopolies over sports wagering under these existing compacts. In other scenarios, states allowed both tribal and non-tribal operators to co-exist and compete, prompting tribes to revisit compacts to ensure they could also offer sports betting in any state where it was permitted for others.

The high stakes of tribal-state negotiations was especially evident in Florida’s 2021 compact with the Seminole Tribe, where the tribe negotiated exclusive statewide sports betting rights, including mobile. While initially challenged in federal court, an appellate ruling ultimately allowed the compact to stand, demonstrating IGRA’s adaptability to modern market conditions and demands.

Conversely, in Washington, the state legislature limited sports wagering to tribal casinos only—again highlighting the range of possibilities under IGRA when tribes and states craft compact terms that reflect and support local policy goals.

Reflecting prior academic research, our focus on evaluating the effectiveness of each tribal regulatory model centered on whether these sportsbook operations ultimately met stated policy objectives, including a balance between revenue generation, consumer protection, and responsible gaming.

Effective regulations were identified as those that ensured fairness, transparency, and the implementation of robust responsible gaming measures. A key recommendation from our findings was for tribal-state compacts to formalize responsible gaming protocols, setting minimum standards for self-exclusion systems, employee training, and problem gambling awareness campaigns.

In regions where legalizing sports betting required a public vote, data demonstrated that having strong responsible gaming policy was key for securing and maintaining public support. Tribes with sportsbooks voluntarily incorporated best practices from successful responsible gaming programs and collaborated with state agencies or non-profit groups to continuously improve.

Our work encouraged ongoing data collection and suggested annual reports evaluating the effectiveness of responsible gaming measures to help stakeholders adjust strategies over time, ensuring that both tribal operators and regulators could address emerging challenges and refine their approaches.

Achieving effectiveness was also evaluated by whether and how tribal sportsbooks operators implemented stable integrity measures—like data monitoring and compliance checks—to maintain bettor confidence and uphold the public trust. Ultimately, these efforts were encouraged in order to create an environment where tribal sports betting would serve as the “gold standard” model of balanced, culturally attuned, and forward-looking gaming regulation with a focus on responsible gaming and consumer protection.

Prediction Problems

A year later, from the vantage point of September 2026, this study seems quaint, even grueling. In the months when we were painstakingly assembling best practices in tribal and state legalization and regulation of sport betting—with a focus on consumer protection and responsible gaming safeguards—we could not have predicted (and did not bet on!) the rapid national takeover of the sports betting industry by the predictions markets platform operators offering their sports events contracts products in all 50 states.

When Kalshi rolled out sports events contracts in January 2025 and added parlay-style and multi-outcome sports statistics contracts for the NFL season in September last year, few people in the state- or tribally-regulated gambling industry would have guessed that a CFTC-regulated platform would soon generate $15 billion in “trading volume” on sports events outcomes in a single month.

What comes next for tribal and state responsible gaming efforts is, truly, unpredictable. More than 16 states are in active legal proceedings with prediction markets platforms and a court circuit split on August 27, 2026 means the Supreme Court is likely to resolve the legal question of whether sports events contracts are subject to state and/or tribal regulation as gambling activity. With Nevada’s ninth circuit win setting up the likely Supreme Court review, AGA President Bill Miller stated, “This ruling is a significant win for consumer protection and taxpayers.” But only if the Supreme Court re-defines events contracts as sports betting.

Student Motivation

Meanwhile, our follow up research on college sports betting in 2026 revealed the breadth and depth of student participation in “events contracts” and its rapid integration into students’ lives—and all in a state that currently prohibits sports betting. (My column for the 2025 AGA Responsible Gaming Education Month focused on the findings and recommendations of this student study.)

A year later, the same dynamic is revealed: while the state- and tribally-regulated gambling industry is focused on painstakingly matching student/player gambling motivation with the proper targeted responsible gaming messaging and intervention, this deliberate scaffolding is discarded altogether by the events contracts platforms with untold consequences. As an anthropologist who studies gambling, chance and luck for a living, it’s difficult to bear the unpredictability of the past year’s seismic shift in the gambling industry and, frankly, embarrassing that I did not see it coming.

But even more significant is the unpredictability of the human cost from this national wildfire which has simply disregarded and bypassed all the responsible gaming and regulatory research and care that the gambling industry has invested in for decades.

Dr. Katherine Spilde is Professor and Endowed Chair of the Sycuan Institute on Tribal Gaming at San Diego State University. She also serves as a board member for the International Center for Responsible Gaming (ICRG).