Kalshi has announced a new partnership with Game Point Capital, a firm that specializes in sports-related financial risk management. The deal comes shortly after a Kalshi CFTC filing for a “Sportsbook Hedging Program” that would facilitate large trades by sports betting companies to lay off company risk. Both moves signal major expansion into real-world risk hedging through prediction markets.
The Game Point partnership announcement came Tuesday morning during an appearance by Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour on CNBC’s Squawk Pod. Mansour outlined the new collaboration in the middle of a broader discussion about Super Bowl trading volumes, insider trading and market integrity monitoring.
Bringing markets into sports insurance
Mansour explained that professional sports teams often insure large bonus payouts tied to championship wins.
“When teams win a championship, there’s a big bonus package that teams have to pay up,” he said.
Those payouts can be large enough that teams hedge the risk ahead of time. Traditionally, he noted, “What they do is they insure it through traditional reinsurers — companies like Lloyd’s, Munich, Swiss, and others.”
Game Point Capital works in exactly this space. The Charleston-based firm offers bonus insurance, postseason revenue guarantees, coaches’ buyout insurance, and ticket revenue hedging for professional teams and college athletic departments, applying quantitative financial modeling and sports analytics to manage performance-linked financial risk.
The Kalshi–Game Point Capital partnership introduces a different model for that risk management: using a marketplace to price and distribute it. Mansour described it as “a better way to basically hedge and insure those risks,” adding that pricing would be more transparent.
Instead of one large insurer holding the exposure, risk could be spread across participants who take positions tied to specific outcomes — such as whether a team wins a championship. Pricing would be determined openly by supply and demand, rather than negotiated behind closed doors. As with any prediction market, the outcomes become tradable contracts, with the market price reflecting the implied probability.
The distinction here is the intended purpose. Rather than retail speculation, the contracts would be used to hedge real corporate financial exposure.
Both major platforms pushing into real-world hedging
The move somewhat mirrors Polymarket’s January partnership with Parcl, which uses Parcl’s daily housing price indices to power real estate prediction markets on the platform. That integration lets traders take positions on whether a city’s home price index finishes up or down over a given period, effectively giving market participants a way to express a view on housing prices without buying property.
Both partnerships point toward the same broader thesis: prediction markets expanding beyond retail speculation into instruments that serve a genuine hedging function.
For Kalshi, the sports insurance angle carries particular significance given the ongoing legal battles over whether its sports contracts constitute financial derivatives or unlicensed gambling. A formal institutional hedging program with fee incentives for high-volume sportsbook participants strengthens the argument that these markets serve a legitimate risk-transfer purpose.
FTC filing reveals Kalshi sportsbook hedging program
The Game Point partnership announcement follows a related regulatory filing that surfaced earlier Tuesday. Noah Zingler-Sternig, Kalshi’s former Head of Operations, flagged a new CFTC filing from KalshiEX (KEX) describing a “Sportsbook Hedging Program.”
The filing, officially received by the CFTC on February 7, is currently under a 10-day review period. According to the filing details, Kalshi will rebate all “taker” fees for orders exceeding 300,000 total contracts traded for hedging purposes described in the program.
The fee rebate structure is designed to provide favorable terms for sportsbooks looking to hedge their exposure on the exchange, a signal that Kalshi is actively courting institutional participants from the traditional sports betting industry, not just retail traders.
This marks a concrete step toward building the infrastructure around what Mansour described in the CNBC interview: a marketplace model for pricing and distributing sports-related financial risk.
Hedging, speculation and market signals
During the CNBC interview, hosts raised a broader question about prediction markets: some investors use these platforms not because they believe an event will occur, but to hedge other positions. For example, an investor might own shares in a company and take a position on a political outcome that could negatively affect that stock.
The question that arose was whether hedging positions in prediction markets distort what the market is signaling.
Mansour said no, arguing that any market functions best when both hedgers and speculators participate. Hedgers transfer risk, while speculators absorb risk when they believe prices aren’t aligned. If pricing moves away from fair value, other traders step in and take advantage of the discrepancy, driving price correction.
That interaction, he argued, leads to efficient pricing over time. The logic mirrors traditional financial markets. Commodity producers hedge future prices, while funds and traders take the other side. Liquidity builds, and prices adjust.
When can sportsbooks start hedging risk on Kalshi?
The sportsbook hedging program filing is under CFTC 10-day review, with the clock starting from the February 7 receipt date. If approved without objection, Kalshi would be able to formally offer the fee rebate structure to sportsbook participants, institutionalizing a hedging pathway that could reshape how the exchange positions itself in ongoing state-level legal fights over the nature of its sports contracts.
