The gang’s all here, again, for the Grade 2 Hollywood Turf Cup on Friday at Del Mar.
The same three who finished first, second, and third in the 2024 Turf Cup return under circumstances likely to produce a different order of finish. Last year, Truly Quality defeated Balnikhov and Nineeleventurbo in the 1 1/2-mile turf race. This year, things have changed.
Onlookers at the Keeneland November breeding stock sale were peering through the pavilion seats to see who was the purchaser after the hammer fell at $3.7 million for Grade 1 winner Lush Lips, a 3-year-old filly being offered as a racing or broodmare prospect. Among the pack was trainer Brendan Walsh, wondering if the filly had been bought by a domestic or international bloodstock collector who might retire her immediately – or if she might wind up back in his barn.
The countdown is on for online and retail sports betting in Missouri. The state will go live on December 1, 2025. This debut will make both mobile and in-person betting legal across the Show-Me State. Once live, you will see all the big markets: moneylines, point spreads, totals, player props, futures, and live, in-game wagers.
The timing could not be better. Legal betting launches right in the middle of a heavy sports month. Read on to find out more about the available betting opportunities you can leverage from day one.
A broad-based prediction market that functions like a stock exchange, Kalshi allows users to buy and sell event contracts among themselves, with some of those events encompassing sports outcomes.
In virtually all industries, there are so-called disruptors, their numbers growing as the world becomes more technologically sophisticated and connected. And in sports betting, there can be no doubt that Kalshi has been one of the U.S. sector's biggest game-changers – even if Kalshi doesn't consider its product to be tantamount to placing a wager.
Unlike traditional sportsbooks, which are regulated on a state-by-state basis, Kalshi is a legal prediction market that functions like a stock exchange and is regulated at the federal level by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). While critics have argued that how Kalshi offers event contracts is a clever end-around to avoid state regulation and taxes, as of late 2025, only seven jurisdictions – Arizona, Illinois, Maryland, Montana, New Jersey, Nevada, and Ohio – had successfully managed to deter Kalshi from operating within their boundaries.
Hence, Kalshi is available 24/7 – save for a two-hour site maintenance window in the wee hours of each Thursday morning – in 43 states to anyone age 18 and up. Functioning along the lines of peer-to-peer or parimutuel horse betting platforms, where users play against each other instead of the house, it offers the ability to make trades in a variety of markets, including politics, weather, pop culture, business, health, and sports. While its sports offerings may not be as robust or dynamic as those at traditional sportsbooks, Kalshi has been expanding its portfolio in this area and remains a viable, legal alternative for people who live in states where sports betting is still outlawed.
While the minimum age to bet on sports in most states is 21, people who want to buy and sell sporting event contracts on Kalshi's platform are only required to be 18 years of age. They must, however, sign up for and fund their accounts before they can start trading and swapping contracts of any kind with fellow users.
Compared to legal sportsbooks – and, again, that's not what Kalshi purports to be – deposit and withdrawal options for Kalshi accounts are rather limited. Account holders may deposit funds through bank transfer, debit card, wire transfer, and cryptocurrency. They may withdraw funds through the same methods, save for wire transfer.
After signing up for and funding their Kalshi account, a new user can get $10 added to their account by trading 100 event contracts. Bear in mind that these contracts can be consistently traded for less than a dollar and for as low as a penny, making the threshold to earn the $10 bonus rather modest from a financial standpoint.
Kalshi offers incentive programs to users based on both volume and size of trades – or liquidity – over set periods of time. It also offers bonuses to users who recruit other users to sign up, provided those users meet minimum trading thresholds.
While Kalshi's menu of sporting events is not as robust as at traditional sportsbooks, it's nothing to sneeze at and will undoubtedly evolve. As of late 2025, users were able to swap contracts on events involving American football, basketball, baseball, hockey, soccer, tennis, golf, chess, esports, and motorsports.
The first key difference between trading sports-event contracts on Kalshi's exchange and betting on a legal sportsbook platform is that all Kalshi trades are yes or no propositions. For instance, if you think the Eagles are going to beat the Bears, you can either press "yes" for the Eagles to win or "no" for the Bears to win.
Which brings us to the second key difference: Kalshi's "odds" are viewable only in percentages and cents. So in that hypothetical Eagles-Bears matchup, if the Eagles have a 70 percent chance of winning, you'll be staking 70 cents to win $1, equaling a base profit of 30 cents. That would extrapolate out to staking $7 to get back $10 (for a $3 profit), and so on and so forth. If you like the Bears to win, a 30-cent – based on odds of 30 percent – stake would yield $1, meaning a 70-cent profit.
In the above scenario, you're staking your money on the equivalent of a moneyline bet, which is a wager – or, in Kalshi's case, a trade – that simply requires you to back the team you think is going to win. But Kalshi also offers the trading equivalent of spreads and totals – aka over-unders.
Whereas a legal sportsbook might put +110 odds on Philadelphia winning by more than 4.5 points in the Eagles' matchup with Chicago, Kalshi would have a customer stake 48 cents to gross $1 on Philadelphia covering that margin of victory. And whereas a sportsbook might put -110 odds on the two teams combining to exceed 47.5 points, Kalshi would offer its users the opportunity to stake 52 cents to gross a dollar on the two teams going over that total.
As for parlays, Kalshi calls them "combos." Figuring out how to make such a trade involves entering "combo" into the Kalshi search bar, but you're essentially taking the "yes" or "no" side of whether two separate events will happen, like backing the "yes" for the Eagles to win AND the total exceeding 47.5 points. It would not be surprising to see Kalshi fine-tune and expand its combo feature going forward and, as with all Kalshi markets, you can suggest a combo and wait to see if enough users are willing to participate in that market to give it the requisite liquidity for Kalshi approval.
While there is no equivalent to microbetting – i.e., betting on who will make the next basket in an NBA game or who will win the next point in a tennis match – on Kalshi's exchange, customers can typically buy into or sell out of a position while a sporting event is in progress, and Kalshi's percentages are updated in real time to reflect the current likelihood of certain results. In a sense, if someone were to sell out of a position for a profit or small loss before the conclusion of an event, that would be the equivalent of the cash-out option seen at most major online sportsbooks.
Kalshi does offer a reasonable number of futures contracts, like whether Oklahoma City will repeat as NBA champion, Nikola Jokic or Shai Gilgeous-Alexander will be MVP, or University of Kansas point guard Darryn Peterson will be the top pick in the next NBA draft over Cameron Boozer or AJ Dybantsa. You can also take the yes or no side of, for example, whether the Milwaukee Bucks will exceed 45 wins over the course of the regular season.
Again, if history is any indication and Kalshi further solidifies its legal footing, it wouldn't be surprising if the number of sports contracts available to trade on the exchange inches closer to the sort of wagering menu offered by a traditional sportsbook.
As with stock exchanges, there are more sophisticated orders, like limit orders, available on Kalshi's platform, but in the interest of keeping things simple here, we'll recommend visiting the "trading" tab in Kalshi's help center for an explanation of how to execute such trades.
Pros:
Markets that extend far beyond the sports world.
Customers trade with each other versus playing against the house.
Ability to buy into and sell out of contracts as often as one wants.
High trading limits.
Ability to create markets that don't already exist.
Resembles a stock exchange for users familiar with them.
Cons:
For users unfamiliar with exchange trading, interface can be intimidating.
Odds of something happening expressed in percentages/cents versus American odds.
Limited signup bonuses and promotions.
Parlay options limited.
Withdrawal and deposit methods somewhat limited.
Kalshi's easy-to-navigate online help center provides answers to common customer questions about virtually everything the exchange has to offer. Should customers need more personalized assistance, Kalshi encourages them to email support@kalshi.com. Customers can also interact with the prediction market via its social-media accounts on Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Discord, and TikTok, with @kalshi being the most common handle.
If responsible gambling advocates were to look at Kalshi with a critical eye, they might not be thrilled with the platform's high limits on trades – which is something Kalshi's higher-volume traders undoubtedly consider an asset.
In April of 2026, Kalshi announced a partnership with IC360 to allow traders to put themselves on a national self-exclusion list, meaning they could not use the exchange for a fixed amount of time in order to prevent irresponsible behavior. And in May of 2026, Kalshi became the first prediction market to join the National Council on Problem Gambling.
But while federal oversight has its advantages, RG professionals would likely bemoan the lack of enhanced scrutiny that state regulation might offer, and Kalshi's age minimum of 18 would not be ideal from a consumer protection standpoint.
Carve up the turkeys and get ready for Thanksgiving football with our Fanatics promo code, worth up to $2,000 in prizes ahead of the Packers vs. Lions holiday showdown.
The promo offer is available for all first-time Fanatics bettors. All of the details about the offer and how it can be redeemed can be found below.
Prepare for the holidays and NFL on Thanksgiving with our BetMGM promo code DEALPLAY, worth up to $1,500 in prizes before kickoff in the Bengals vs. Ravens TNF matchup.
The deal works by protecting against losing wagers for up to $1,500. The complete details about the offer can be found below.
Thanksgiving, a time to treasure family while tucking into a tableful of familiar comfort food. That tableau could hardly be further removed from the chaotic mess of a race that is this year’s Thanksgiving Classic.
The traditional Thanksgiving feature at Fair Grounds, a six-furlong dirt race for older horses, drew 10 entrants who last started at six different venues.
We have a horse, The Donegal Clan, coming out of the Delta Mile at Delta Downs, and another, Bear River, who ran in the Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint.
Alani, a 4-year-old filly trained by Michael Moore, has finished second behind stakes winners in her last two starts, but the waters could be calmer in the $75,000 Cornucopia Handicap at Parx Racing on Wednesday.
“We claimed her at the end of last year, and she’s just been really good,” Moore said. “She pretty much tries every time and it looks like a pretty good spot for her on Wednesday.”
The 4-year-old filly Alpine Princess is a multiple stakes winner with earnings of more than $700,000, a successful career by any measure – except one.
Alpine Princess has yet to win a graded stakes race, a hole in her résumé connections hope to fill Thursday at Churchill Downs in the Grade 3, $400,000 Falls City.
The Falls City, for fillies and mares over 1 1/8 miles on dirt, drew 10 entrants and came up strong for the class level.
