On Monday, October 26, the NBA handed its official seal of approval to the prediction market boom. Kalshi and Polymarket are now the league’s “preferred” platforms, ESPN reported. The NHL and MLB had already inked similar deals, and the NBA also expanded its DraftKings partnership to cover DraftKings’ own prediction market product.
Great news for the platforms. But for the average fan looking to wager on the season, the partnership raises a much more practical question: Are you actually getting a better deal on these apps than you would at a traditional sportsbook?
To figure it out, we didn’t guess. We looked at the actual prices.
Using data from WagerBeasts, an odds aggregator that tracks more than 50 sportsbooks and prediction markets, we pulled the last prices posted before tip-off for 52 regular-season games played between October 20 and October 26, 2026. We stuck to the simplest wager in sports: picking the winner. With two teams per game, that’s 104 bets.
What we found might make you rethink where you place your NBA bets.
Same Game, Very Different Payouts
Let’s look at opening night. The Philadelphia 76ers were underdogs at the New York Knicks. Philly ended up pulling off the upset, 106-100.
If you dropped $100 on the 76ers right before tip-off, here is what you’d have been paid depending on where you played it:
| Where you bet | Payout, after fees | Profit on a winning $100 bet |
|---|---|---|
| Novig | 2.60x | $160 |
| Polymarket (global) | 2.56x | $156 |
| Kalshi | 2.46x | $146 |
| DraftKings, BetMGM, Caesars, Fanatics | 2.45x | $145 |
| FanDuel | 2.40x | $140 |
Same game. Same outcome. The Polymarket bettor walked away with $11 more than the DraftKings bettor, and $16 more than the FanDuel bettor.
That wasn’t a one-off. Across all the underdogs in the sample, Polymarket’s prices were worth about $16 in extra profit per winning $100 bet, compared with the typical price at the big five US sportsbooks (DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, Caesars and Fanatics).
Note for US readers: the Polymarket prices here are from its global exchange. Polymarket US is a separate app with its own fees.
Follow the Money
This brings us to the ultimate Kalshi vs Polymarket debate. Head to head, Polymarket offered the better payout on 99 out of 104 bets.
Why does Polymarket win so often? It comes down to how each platform makes its money.
Traditional sportsbooks build a “vig,” or margin, into their lines. If you add up the implied probabilities of both teams winning, the total always exceeds 100%. That excess is the house’s cut. Prediction markets work more like stock exchanges. Traders bet against each other, and the platform makes its money from trading fees instead of from the odds.
Polymarket currently charges zero trading fees on NBA markets. Its only cost to the user is the tiny spread between the buy and sell price. Here is the median house cut per game across those 52 games:
Prediction markets
- Novig: 0.5%
- Polymarket (global): 1.0%
- Kalshi: 4.3%
The big five US sportsbooks
- FanDuel: 4.1%
- DraftKings: 4.3%
- Caesars: 4.3%
- Fanatics: 4.5%
- BetMGM: 4.6%
Polymarket’s cut was about a quarter of the standard sportsbook rate (which hovered around 4.5% across all sportsbooks). That structural advantage is exactly why Polymarket beat the big five’s typical price on 96% of the wagers we checked. The gap was especially wide on underdogs, where Polymarket paid 4.8% more on average, compared with 2.7% on favorites.
Kalshi, meanwhile, landed right next to DraftKings at 4.3%.
Kalshi’s Hidden Catch
On screen, Kalshi looks every bit as cheap as Polymarket. Across our 52 games, the prices listed in its app carried a cut of just 1.0%, the same as Polymarket’s and about a quarter of what the big sportsbooks charge.
That number is a mirage. On the 76ers game, both apps showed a 39-cent contract that pays $1 if Philly wins: same price, same 2.56x payout. But every time you buy at the listed price on Kalshi, it adds a “taker” fee of 7% × price × (1 − price). On a 39-cent contract, that’s about 1.7 cents, and it quietly turns the 2.56x payout into 2.46x.
Across the sample, that fee pushed Kalshi’s real cut from 1.0% to 4.3%, tying DraftKings. Kalshi had the best price on zero of the 104 bets.
You can dodge part of this fee by using limit orders (naming your price and waiting for a match). But if the game starts before your order fills, you miss the bet entirely.
Where the Best Prices Actually Live
So who actually had the best price? Here is how often each site topped the market across all 104 bets. When sites tied, each one gets the credit.
Prediction markets
- Novig: 51 times
- Polymarket (global): 38 times
- Kalshi: never
Other sportsbooks
- BetVictor: 6 times
- Everygame: 5 times
- Betway, Coolbet, Neds: 4 times each
- BetAnything, Sky Bet, theScore Bet, Unibet: 2 times each
- 14 others: once each
Betting exchange
The big five US sportsbooks
- BetMGM: 3 times
- FanDuel: once
- DraftKings, Caesars, Fanatics: never
Notice who is missing from the top of that list: the biggest names in US sports betting. The top two spots went to prediction markets, Novig (a smaller prediction market app) and Polymarket. When anyone else did beat them, it was usually by a razor-thin margin of just over 1%. You can check tonight’s slate yourself on WagerBeasts’ NBA odds and predictions page to see where the sharpest prices are hiding.
Are Prediction Markets Smarter Than Vegas?
Here is the reality check. Prediction markets aren’t magic. They don’t have some secret algorithm that outsmarts Vegas.
Once you strip away the house cut, the two groups basically agree. In a typical game, the win probability implied by the prediction markets was within 0.6 percentage points of the sportsbooks’ average. The widest gap in our entire 52-game sample was Celtics vs. Bulls on October 26. The books gave Boston an 84% chance to win. The markets said 86%. Boston blew them out 134-99.
Favorites won 36 of the 52 games (69%), slightly more than the 64% the odds implied. Over seven nights, that’s normal variance, not a sign that the markets are geniuses. The real takeaway is that prediction markets are cheaper to use, not smarter.
What to Do Tonight
The NBA’s new partnership doesn’t magically change the math, but it does make prediction markets impossible to ignore.
Before you lock in a wager tonight, check the price across a few different apps. During the first week of the season, on nine out of every ten underdog bets, the best available price paid at least $10 more per winning $100 bet than the typical big-five sportsbook. WagerBeasts does that heavy lifting for you, comparing every NBA game across dozens of books and markets.