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What is Penalty?
Across the market, operators delivered high double-digit gains compared with Labor Day weekend, which featured a full slate of college football games but no NFL contests. Two operators, DraftKings and Underdog each saw triple-digit growth, delivering weekly increases of 125% and 119%, respectively. Three others, Polymarket, Crypto.com and Novig, saw gains of at least 30%, led by Polymarket with a weekly increase of 46%.
One interesting nugget surrounds weekend figures at Kalshi, where volume on Sunday only surpassed prior daily activity by $34 million, BofA data shows. Typically, Sunday volume for the quarter dwarfs that of College Football Saturdays due to the voracious demand for NFL offerings. BofA analyst Shaun Kelley attributes the irregularity to the possibility that Kalshi is “over indexing” on college sports.
Kelley also cited improvements at Robinhood as a possible factor for the regression at Kalshi. Just before the NFL season, Robinhood took a minority stake in Crypto.com and struck a deal to begin routing NFL contracts to OG.com, the site’s regulated prediction market platform.
What is Penalty?
Announced on Thursday, the strategic partnership will grant Spotlight’s network of global sportsbook operators access to Engage Games’ bespoke games, each built collaboratively with Spotlight’s partners.
It marks Spotlight’s first expansion into gaming, combining the company’s global product and content distribution with Engage Games’ platform and track record in free-to-play and pay-to-play games.
Spotlight said the decision to enter the gaming sphere comes as operators increasingly turn towards free-to-play games as a means of “engagement, retention, reactivation and acquisition”.
How to play Penalty
The final third derives from a further 0.4% of a club’s gaming machine profits over $1 million during a tax year.
However, the scheme has faced ongoing scrutiny and criticism. Clubs can direct the funds towards upgrading their own facilities, and there is no mandated verification for how the grant recipients must deploy the money.
The latest 2025 contribution report indicated that $127 million was awarded, with $53.3 million specifically allocated to sport-related organisations.
