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We’re on the cusp of March Madness betting. The three-week tournament is expected to garner $3.3 billion in bets across the country. Florida sports betting, one of the hottest markets in the nation, will contribute greatly to that number.
To put that into perspective, $3.3 billion is about double what Super Bowl betting generates. This year’s game between the Patriots and Seahawks was worth $1.75 billion in bets. Of course, that’s only one game on one day. The tourney is 67 games in three weeks.
Anyways, the tourney betting figure is courtesy of the American Gaming Association. Per their data, this would represent a 6 percent increase from a year ago. It’s a good improvement, but also a sign of things slowing down. In the three years prior, the AGA says March Madness betting jumped 54 percent.
Naturally, you do expect sone tapering off. The legal sports betting industry can’t grow infinitely. At a certain point, the top sports betting apps can’t keep getting new users at will — certainly not as easily as they did when this stuff first became legal.
But the AGA’s $3.3 billion number is strictly for traditional sportsbooks. It does NOT factor in money spent on the NCAA tourney at prediction sites like Kalshi and Polymarket. And that’s the story here: how much are these prediction markets eating into traditional sportsbooks like Hard Rock, which have a monopoly in the state of Florida. Let’s figure it out in this article.
Prediction Markets Have Gone Vertical Since 2025 Tournament
On March 16 — one day after Selection Sunday and three days before the start of the NCAA Tournament — Kalshi said they’d already done $60 million in trading volume on its prediction market for the men’s NCAA Tournament champion. Ironically, a lot of that money is likely on the Florida Gators to win the title. They are the defending champions and per popular offshore sportsbooks, the Gators have fourth-best odds to win it all (behind only Arizona, Duke, and Michigan).
But here’s the crazy part. A year ago, Kalshi did $75.4 million on the same market. Mind you, this was for the entirety of the tournament — not just a few days like in 2026. Assuming the data is real, this is another signal to show big these platforms have gotten in the last 365 days.
And you probably don’t need data to verify this. You, reading this, how much did you know about Polymarket a year ago? Probably not that much, right? Now, they are everywhere with massive names like Logan Paul and Kevin O’Leary advertising them at boxing events and the Oscars. With the rapid rise in trading volume, prediction sites have upped their marketing and mindshare.
For the most part, sports contracts barely became a thing on these sites in the last year. Before then, they mostly offered markets on politics or world events. It’s why their NCAA Tournament volume was just ok in 2025. Kalshi says the entire tournament (not just the championship) netted them around $500 million in trading volume — $409 million on the men’s event, and the rest on the women.
We expect them to blow those numbers out of the water in 2026. If they do, Florida sportsbooks like Hard Rock won’t be happy, as we explain in the next section.
Prediction Markets Gain Is Sportsbooks’ Loss
As we said earlier, betting apps aren’t signing up new players in droves like before. In Florida, Hard Rock has been widely accessible since June 2024 — this is when the Supreme Court ruled in their favor after three years of stop-and-starts in the Sunshine State. So Hard Rock App is still getting sign-ups, but many betting-inclined users are already there.
So if Hard Rock wants to increase betting revenues come tournament time, the hope is that those bettors stick around and ideally, start betting more. But how much of those bettors will just throw money on Polymarket or Kalshi? Hell, they might even use the prediction sites of DraftKings or FanDuel — both of which launched recently and work in Florida despite the sports betting products not.
That’s what the entire industry is wondering, not just in Florida’s case, but the whole country. Since Hard Rock is owned by the Seminoles tribe, they don’t have to publicly report sports betting numbers like other states that run the gambling industry and have to stay transparent for tax purposes. So we won’t get a definitive answer in Florida.
Still, you have to assume prediction markets will take a bite out of things. That’s not good news for an industry that has razor-sharp margins to begin with. For example, H2 Gambling Capital estimates sportsbooks across the country will only hold about 7 percent on tourney wagers. “Hold” is the money sportsbooks keep after paying back winners.
That’s if things go to plan. If all the betting favorites win — as they did last year with the Final Four being all No. 1 seeds — this hurts the hold since most casual bettors pick favorites.
We’ll have a clearer answer on all this in early April when the tournament ends. That’s when we’ll know betting numbers and trading volumes enough to assess the “damage.”
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