Gambling Arrives in Pickleball... Sort Of

Gambling is finally here in pickleball….well…kind of. Technically you can take a financial position through the Polygon blockchain network and trade shares that represent the likelihood of specific outcomes occurring in the future as long as you use a virtual private network. Alright, let’s break that down. Watch the video on Instagram!

So, yesterday MLP and other league sources announced that positions are now available through Polymarket. If you don’t know what Polymarket is, I’ll break it down for you quickly. Polymarket essentially allows you to bet on events. Let’s use a pickleball example: Anna Leigh Waters will be the #1 ranked singles player at the end of 2025. You can essentially purchase “shares” in whether this outcome will occur or not. Since this is pretty likely to occur, the price of a share would be something like 95 cents, reflecting the 95% likelihood that she will end the year at the #1 ranking. But let’s say that she announced that she’s taking a break from singles. Well, the likelihood that she ends the year as #1 would go down significantly, and so would the price of the share. People can trade their positions throughout the year or wait until the event does or does not occur. If you own a share of Anna Leigh and she ends the year as #1, you would earn a dollar. If you own a share of Anna Leigh and she ends the year not ranked #1, your share would have no value.

So, if Polymarket sounds like betting, that’s because it pretty much is, and that’s what the Commodity Futures Trading Commission thought as well. They issued a cease and desist in 2022, and Polymarket has been idle in the United States since then. But Polymarket fired back saying that they’re not doing anything different than other financial markets, and as a result, they’re able to come back online this fall.

So, in the meantime, you can bet on Major League Pickleball using Polymarket depending on where you are in the world. There are only two prediction markets for pickleball right now: Who will make the New York City Final Four and who will win the Major League Pickleball Championship. This is an interesting step in the inevitable move towards gambling in pickleball.