New York Sues Polymarket for Illegal Gambling. Eight Counts, a Threefold Penalty, and a Hundred Thousand Dollars per Offer

Event contracts are the latest attempt, after binary options and after slot machines dressed up as investment terminals, to repackage gambling as investment. New York shows what a state looks like when it understands this before the first wave of victims. Poland has a law that can name the product; it does not yet have a law for the channels through which the product will arrive.

On September 24, 2026, Letitia James, the Attorney General of New York, filed a verified petition against QCX LLC, a Delaware company headquartered in Manhattan and doing business as Polymarket US. The pleading went to the Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County, which, despite its name, is the trial court. The state pleads eight causes of action, all of them civil: a violation of Article I, Section 9 of the state constitution; three provisions of the Penal Law on promoting gambling and possessing bookmaking records; three provisions of the Racing Law that govern sports wagering; and the federal Wire Act. It asks for a permanent injunction against operating without a license from the State Gaming Commission, an accounting of every wager accepted, restitution and disgorgement of profits, a penalty of three times the company’s gain from the conduct (the petition invokes Penal Law § 80.10), and a hundred thousand dollars for each offer of a sports wager. The group to which the respondent belongs is, according to reports the petition cites, valued at more than twenty billion dollars, and its annualized revenue since the launch of the American platform reportedly exceeds a billion. Courthouse News reported the filing; the petition itself runs thirty-three pages and rests on two affirmations, one by Geoffrey R. Andreu, an Assistant Attorney General, and one by Brian Metz, an investigator who spent the summer placing bets.

It is the latest in a series of New York actions against prediction-market platforms this year: Coinbase and Gemini in April, Kalshi in July, now Polymarket. I wrote in May about what event contracts are and why the fight over their name is a fight over everything. Polymarket’s response to the petition was that it is “a recycled lawsuit,” a “copy/paste.” The company is right. In this case, that is not an objection.

The thesis of this piece is simple and follows from the earlier ones. Event contracts are the latest attempt to repackage gambling as investment: after binary options, which needed a decade before Western states called them by their name, and after the Polish slot machines dressed up as investment terminals, which the Polish Supreme Court named in 2022. The American dispute will decide whether the attempt succeeds in the United States. In Poland something else will be decided: whether the state prepares before the product arrives, or only after the first wave of victims. Polish law can name this product as gambling without a new statute; I wrote as much in May, and nothing in that respect has changed. What Polish law does not yet have is reach where this product will enter: the law reaches the domain and the payment service; it does not reach the app store, the on-chain wallet, or the foreign influencer who does not say “bet” but “position.” If that gap remains, the flood will come, not because the law is missing but because its reach is shorter than the product.

A Bet for Three Dollars and One Cent

Brian Metz, an investigator in the Attorney General’s office, opened an account with a New York address and spent the summer doing what an ordinary user does. On July 6, 2026, he bought 6.39 “contracts” on the Mets beating the Braves, at roughly forty-six cents apiece. He paid three dollars and one cent, including a ten-cent fee. The Mets won; his account was credited with six dollars and thirty-nine cents. On August 7th, he bought ninety-four “Yes” contracts on the proposition that a contestant named Dee Valladares would be eliminated in week four of the twenty-eighth season of “Big Brother,” at a penny each, a dollar in all, six cents of it fees. On August 24th, he looked in on a market titled “New York Governor Election Winner.” On August 27th, he placed, in a single day, more than five bets totaling more than five thousand dollars, because that is precisely the threshold at which the New York Penal Law begins to speak of promoting gambling in the first degree (§ 225.10). The petition documents these transactions with screenshots and trade confirmations, and some of them with video as well.

The petition arranges the purchases into a simple sequence: the price of a contract, in cents, roughly tracks a probability; the payout is always a dollar or nothing; the platform, the petition says, takes a fee on every wager. Paragraph 43 is five words long: “Each contract is a bet.” To this the state adds point spreads (whether the Dodgers would beat the Mets by more than a run and a half), combined bets (parlays at a sportsbook, “combos” at Polymarket), a twenty-dollar promotion with the code FREE20, a referral program that pays out on deposits of ten dollars or more, and contracts on New York college teams: Syracuse, St. John’s, Buffalo against Albany on September 3rd. Not even a licensed New York operator may take bets on those. Membership is open at eighteen; the state requires twenty-one.

The most interesting count concerns paperwork. The platform’s own rulebook obliges it to keep “a printable record of all of the terms of each trade,” and its daily market reports publish the date, the contract, the settlement price, and the volume. In the language of an exchange, this is transparency. In the language of the petition, which reaches for Penal Law § 225.20, it is “possession of gambling records in the first degree,” provided, of course, that the underlying business turns out to be unlawful. The ledger that was meant to vouch for the market’s honesty becomes, in the petition, an exhibit.

Then there is the marketing, which the state quotes with evident relish: an August, 2025, post reading “BAD NEWS (For sportsbooks): Polymarket is coming home to the US. TRADE EVERY FOOTBALL GAME IN ALL 50 STATES”; the December, 2025, launch announcement, “launching with sports, followed by markets on everything”; the release naming Polymarket the “Official & Exclusive Prediction Market Partner of the New York Rangers,” with the flourish “As a NYC based company, we’re honored & proud to defend home ice”; and the App Store listing from August, 2026: “legal in all 50 states.” It would be hard to assemble better material for a charge of knowing and persistent conduct.

The Petition That Never Says “C.F.T.C.”

In the spring, the fight over prediction markets was being waged on a different floor. In April, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued the State of New York in federal court in the Southern District of New York, seeking a declaration that event contracts are swaps within its exclusive jurisdiction and that state gambling law does not reach them. The C.F.T.C.’s chairman, Michael Selig, said at the time that Congress had “specifically rejected such a fragmented patchwork of state regulations” because it produced poorer consumer protection.

The petition of September 24th says nothing about any of this. There is no “C.F.T.C.,” no Commodity Exchange Act, no “preemption,” not even the name Kalshi. The Attorney General writes as though the federal regulator did not exist and the dispute concerned a bookmaker in the Bronx.

There are two ways to read this, and both are hypotheses rather than findings. The first: it is a choice of procedure. The petition proceeds under Section 63(12) of the state’s Executive Law, which gives the Attorney General a summary special proceeding against repeated illegal acts or persistent illegality in the conduct of business (the petition, in each of its eight counts, uses its own compound phrase, “repeated and persistent illegality”). In that proceeding, the state shows violations of state law, and it falls to the respondent to raise the federal shield: to plead that federal law preempts the state’s, before the state court or, if an independent jurisdictional basis exists, in federal court after removal. Under the well-pleaded-complaint rule (Caterpillar v. Williams, 1987) a preemption defense does not, by itself, open the federal courthouse door. Whoever says the word “preemption” first takes on the task of explaining why a one-cent contract on the outcome of a reality show is a derivative. Polymarket said it the same day: according to CNBC, on September 24th it sought removal to federal court and filed a separate federal action against New York officials. If the petition was written to force that move, it forced it within hours.

The second: it is a choice of terrain. In April, the Third Circuit affirmed a preliminary injunction that a district court had granted Kalshi against New Jersey, by a vote of two to one. The majority held that a sports contract traded on a C.F.T.C.-designated exchange is a swap within exclusive federal jurisdiction, and that this displaces even the state’s ban on college wagers; the dissenting judge saw in the product ordinary gambling. That is the strongest argument on the other side, and it should be stated plainly: if that reading holds, most of the petition’s counts fall with it. But in July a federal judge in New York denied Kalshi’s motion for preliminary relief against the state’s regulators, and Nevada, Massachusetts, and Washington obtained orders restricting the platform’s operations. These are interlocutory rulings, not judgments on the merits, and they do not bind the state court in a new case. The Attorney General nonetheless walks into state court knowing that, on her own ground, the federal argument has already lost once, if only at the preliminary stage.

There is a third element, the least obvious: the eighth count. The state alleges a violation of the federal Wire Act of 1961, which prohibits the interstate transmission of bets on sporting events over wire communications. A state officer is invoking a federal criminal statute as the predicate for a civil claim under Section 63(12); no one is being prosecuted. If the court accepts the construction, the preemption argument stops being sufficient for the defense: it would also have to explain why one federal statute should displace another. That is a hypothesis, but one the defense will have to take seriously.

And, finally, the allegations about New York college teams and the admission of eighteen-year-olds. Neither is permitted to any of the state’s nine licensed mobile operators, but these are not counts that sidestep the federal question: if federal law preempts state law, it preempts the ban on betting on Syracuse and the age of twenty-one along with everything else, and the Third Circuit ruled in New Jersey on precisely such a college-wager restriction. What these allegations do is different. They raise the price of the preemption question. A court that rules for the platform must write that federal designation of an exchange allows it to take, from a nineteen-year-old, a bet on his own university’s game, something no licensed bookmaker in the state may do. The petition is built so that that sentence is a hard one for a court to write.

“Copy/Paste,” or a Program, Not a Case

Neal Kumar, Polymarket’s chief legal officer, told Courthouse News that the Attorney General’s “decision to copy/paste a recycled lawsuit is disappointing,” called it a “media hit,” and added that the company’s door was open to a conversation about “how we protect consumers and offer fair, transparent and legal markets.”

The charge of recycling is accurate. The Polymarket petition repeats the architecture of July’s petition against Kalshi, and both grow out of a line the office has been building since February: the suit against Valve over loot boxes in Counter-Strike; the April suits against Coinbase and Gemini; in April, too, the amicus brief of a bipartisan coalition of thirty-eight attorneys general (thirty-seven states and the District of Columbia) supporting Massachusetts against Kalshi; Kalshi in July; Polymarket in September. Formally, these are five distinct suits on different legal footings, plus one amicus brief. Read together, they form one enforcement program, in which each new pleading is a refined version of the last and each ruling lays a course for the next.

Polish readers know this mechanism from the other side. In my piece on games of chance, I described how Poland’s Supreme Court built its definition of randomness on three rulings involving one defendant and one family of slot machines. A line of authority is rarely born of a single great case; more often it comes from several similar ones. New York’s Attorney General is doing the same thing, faster, and on her own initiative. “Same as the neighbor’s” is an objection against a plaintiff only when the neighbor won.

Courthouse News notes one more fact, which belongs to the description of the forces at play rather than to any judgment of them: Donald Trump, Jr., sits on Polymarket’s advisory board, and the C.F.T.C., formally an independent agency, has under its chairman, Michael Selig, consistently sided with the platforms in this dispute and sued the states. No one has shown a connection between the one fact and the other, and I do not claim one; I note the alignment. New York is contending not only with an operator but with a federal regulator over who has the right to name the product.

Two Tests in One Sentence, or How New York Sidesteps the Argument About Chance

Paragraph 79 of the petition reads: the outcome of the respondent’s contracts “depends to a material degree upon an element of chance, which in fact predominates over any skill of the bettor, notwithstanding that the skill of the bettor may also be a factor.” In May, I described the competing tests of chance that courts around the world apply: the material-element test, under which it suffices that chance is a significant component of the outcome, and the predominance test, under which chance must outweigh skill. New York’s statute chose the first: a contest of chance, in Penal Law § 225.00, is one whose outcome depends in a material degree on an element of chance, notwithstanding that the skill of the contestants may also be a factor. The Attorney General pleads more than she must: not only a material element of chance but its predominance. This is not a menu for the court. It is belt and suspenders.

More important is what does not need to be proved at all. New York’s definition of gambling, in Penal Law § 225.00, covers staking something of value “upon the outcome of a contest of chance or a future contingent event not under his control or influence.” The second limb requires no chance. On the side of mechanism, it is enough that the event lies beyond the bettor’s control; the stake and the agreed payout, the definition’s other elements, are not in dispute here. A gubernatorial election lies beyond his control. An elimination on “Big Brother” lies beyond his control. The entire debate about skill that the industry has been conducting since the poker case of DiCristina (won at trial, reversed on appeal) does not touch this limb at all. The limb has a second edge, though, and it should be named: lack of control over an event does not, by itself, distinguish a bet from an insurance policy or a wheat future. What distinguishes them is not the mechanism but the legal regime built around each: insurable interest for the policy, the commodities and securities statutes for the future, and only where federal law actually preempts state law, which is precisely what two circuits now dispute. Which is why the preemption question does not go away; it merely moves from the concept of chance to the concept of a swap.

Poland’s Gambling Act of 2009 is built the same way, in different words. Article 2(2) defines mutual wagers as bets for cash or in-kind prizes that consist in guessing either the results of sporting competition among people or animals, with winnings drawn from the pool of stakes (totalizators), or the occurrence of various events, including virtual ones, with winnings set by an agreed ratio of stake to payout (bookmaking). The definition asks nothing about chance or skill; chance enters with the definitions of games of chance and slot-machine games in Article 2(1), (3), and (5), which is to say the world of lotteries, casinos, and slot machines. An exchange contract that pays a dollar sits closest to the second limb, though the exchange structure, in which users bet against one another while the operator matches orders and takes a fee, raises a question of its own: who, here, is the party accepting the bet. That is where a Polish analysis would begin when the first such product reaches a Polish authority. For wagers on events, the dispute over the boundaries of chance, which I examined in May against four rulings of the Polish Supreme Court, is a dispute about a different shelf. The Polish rulings on slot machines dressed up as investment terminals show that financial vocabulary does not settle classification, but they do not excuse anyone from examining the particular contract. In the European Union that examination has a surprising ending: in a public statement of July, 2026, ESMA, the E.U. securities regulator, concluded that event contracts which meet the definition of a financial instrument are binary options and fall under the national bans on selling them to retail clients, and that gambling law may apply alongside them. In Europe, then, an event contract has two roads, bet or financial instrument, and both lead to the same door. As a financial instrument it has been closed to retail clients since 2019 by decision of the Polish securities regulator (after ESMA’s temporary ban of 2018), with narrow exceptions that do not cover a one-cent contract on a reality show. As a wager it is prohibited without a Polish permit, and with one it is a wager like any other at a Polish bookmaker: with gaming tax, with responsible-gaming rules, and with an age check at the door. The state has already decided how this product may reach a retail client. The dispute is whether the operator will walk through that door. New York and Warsaw arrived at the construction independently: a wager is defined by its object, a game of chance by its mechanism.

Who Hedges an Elimination on “Big Brother”?

In my piece on event contracts, I proposed a regulatory test, not a legal one, by which a legislature could settle such disputes without recourse to definitions: does the product serve the economy, or does it feed on human weakness? The petition supplies better material for that test than I could have invented. A one-cent contract on whether a particular contestant leaves the show in week four hedges no risk that the petition knows of, and I have not been able to imagine one. There are, however, ninety-four contracts bought for a dollar, six cents of it fees, and this is precisely the operation that the C.F.T.C. describes on its own website as helping the public “forecast, plan for, hedge, and even harness perceptions of future events.” In fairness, here is what the other side will say: the Commodity Exchange Act does not require every participant in a market to hedge anything; speculators are welcome in every futures market, and the Third Circuit did not ask whether anyone was hedging. That is true. And it is exactly why the functional test belongs to the legislature, not to the court.

The Attorney General adds a dimension that is often missing from disputes over definitions and is, for a state judge, the most tangible: money. Since the Supreme Court, in Murphy v. NCAA (2018), returned to the states the power to regulate sports betting, New York has built its own regime: nine licensed mobile operators pay a tax of roughly fifty-one per cent of gross gaming revenue. In 2024, they generated about two billion dollars in revenue and paid more than a billion in taxes, which fund public schools, youth sports programs, and the treatment of gambling addiction. The respondent in this case pays none of that tax. The question of whether a contract is a bet is, in this petition, the question of who pays for the school.

And a third dimension. The state’s addiction-services office identifies the eighteen-to-twenty-four age group as a high-risk population; the problem-gambling helpline took more than fourteen thousand calls between 2020 and 2024; since 2022, mobile sports betting has overtaken casinos as the leading reason for those calls. Those figures describe the state, not this platform. Polymarket admits players from the age of eighteen and, according to the petition, operates without the self-exclusion register and the limits that state law imposes on licensed operators; the platform answers that it verifies identities and polices trading conduct, which is protection of a different kind. The Attorney General does not write that the platform causes addiction. She writes that it operates without the safeguards the state deemed necessary for an identical product under another name.

Polymarket in Poland: Two Platforms, One Law

For readers in Poland, a distinction that does not make the headlines matters. The petition concerns QCX LLC, the American entity that runs a platform for users in the United States under the C.F.T.C.’s oversight. A user in Poland who types in polymarket.com lands on the global platform, settled in cryptocurrency, which formally does not serve American customers and which, according to the platform’s own geographic-restrictions page, should not be serving Poles either: Poland is listed there among jurisdictions where users may close existing positions but not open new ones. These are two platforms and two regulatory frameworks under one brand. Anyone who circumvents that restriction does so against the platform’s terms and at his own risk, which matters for everything that follows. The New York case therefore does not directly concern what a user in Poland sees on the screen. It concerns exactly the same question: whether a product’s name changes its nature.

In Poland, the answer already exists, and I have written about it twice. Offering wagers on the outcomes of events without a Polish permit is prohibited, and the operator faces criminal liability under Article 107 § 1 of the Fiscal Penal Code, the statute that governs tax, customs, and gambling offenses. Less well known, and for the user more important, is § 2 of the same article: mere participation, on Polish territory, in a foreign mutual wager is itself an offense. I have described the same logic in writing about the legal consequences of playing at an unlicensed online casino and about offshore casinos and their Polish customers; a wager on an event is not an exception here but the next instance. Anyone who, while on Polish territory, bets on a match or an election on a platform without a Polish permit risks liability regardless of the platform’s calling his bet a contract and his deposit a position; liability requires culpability and the other elements of the offense, of course, and the classification of the product is its first question, not its last. Settlement in crypto-assets does not change that assessment automatically; it requires a separate examination of the token, the contract, and the service. If the contract is a financial instrument, MiFID II and the national retail ban on binary options govern it; if it is not, the E.U.’s MiCA regulation and its authorization requirement for crypto-asset service providers may apply; gambling law applies alongside, not instead. The same set of questions applies to all online gambling offered to Poles from abroad, from casinos to bookmakers.

A client who has already deposited money on such a platform and lost it usually asks one thing: can it be recovered? With an unlicensed operator, the road is narrow and depends on circumstances I described in answering the question of how to recover money from an online casino. I do not wish to promise anything here. I wish to set out the order of the questions: first, whether the operator holds a Polish permit (the Ministry of Finance publishes a list of licensed bookmakers); then, whether participation has exposed the client himself to liability; and only then, whether there is anything, and anyone, to recover from. Taxes are a separate matter, and I have written separately on the taxation of gambling proceeds; a product that calls itself trading invites the client to settle up as if with an exchange, while the tax authority may see, in the same event, winnings from a wager, with different consequences.

The Flood That Polish Law Is Not Yet Ready For

What it will look like can be described with some confidence, because we have seen it once already. Between 2010 and 2018, binary options travelled this road: a license in a friendly state, a European passport, advertising during sports broadcasts and on social media, the language of investment in place of the language of the bet, and then a wave of victims, ESMA’s temporary ban of 2018, and the Polish regulator’s national ban from 2019, imposed after the harm, not before it. From the firm’s own casework we know what that decade cost the people who believed they were buying a financial instrument. Event contracts will arrive through three channels at once, and each of them bypasses a tool that Polish law built for the previous war.

The first channel is the European passport. Once the American dispute is resolved, whichever way, operators holding federal licenses will look for the next market and for a MiFID license in a friendly member state, and four hundred and fifty million consumers behind a single passport are the obvious address. ESMA’s July statement is a wall here, legally solid and practically made of paper: it says that an event contract which is a financial instrument is a binary option subject to the retail ban, but the ban is enforced by a national regulator against an operator seated elsewhere, who will argue that its contract does not meet the definition. The second channel is cryptocurrency. The global Polymarket settles in stablecoins on a public blockchain, and anyone who can write an interface can put its markets in a new app; Poland’s register of blocked domains under Article 15f of the Gambling Act, and its payment-blocking rule under Article 15g, were written for internet domains and for payment services tied to a site entered in the register, not for wallets and on-chain contracts. The third channel is app stores and influencers. A product that calls itself a “forecasting app” enters the App Store and TikTok without the word “gambling,” and the advertising ban in Article 29 of the act, although it defines advertising and promotion functionally, as any public encouragement to take part, operates only once the product has been classified as a wager, which the operator will contest, and reaches the promoter only when he is within the Polish authority’s grasp.

Against this, Poland has more than is usually assumed, and I wrote about it in May. A definition of a mutual wager built on the object of the bet, not on chance, which does not care what the platform calls itself. Article 107 § 1 of the Fiscal Penal Code for the organizer and § 2 for the participant, with a fine of up to a hundred and twenty daily rates for mere participation in a foreign wager. A state monopoly on online casino games, which makes every other illegal online casino unlawful toward a Polish customer, and Ministry of Finance permits for bookmaking. The domain register, the payment block, and a Supreme Court that in four rulings rejected four successive ways around the definition, including, in V KK 173/22, packaging as a financial instrument. And Article 2(6) of the act, which lets the Minister of Finance decide, on application or of his own motion, whether a given product is a mutual wager. None of that needs to be written again. Five things need to be added.

First, the betting exchange. The act knows the totalizator and the bookmaker; it does not know a market on which users bet against one another while the operator matches orders and takes a fee. The British Gambling Act has had a separate betting-intermediary license since 2005; the Polish act has none, which today means that a betting exchange cannot be licensed in Poland at all, and tomorrow will mean that an operator says, “I accept no bets, I only match them,” and litigates the point through every instance. The Minister of Finance can answer quickly, by decision under Article 2(6), but a decision covers one product and can be appealed; the Supreme Court will probably reach the right answer by interpretation, as it did with the slot machines, but only after several years. A legislature that adds the matching of wagers to Article 2(2) saves both the decisions and the years.

Second, an end to the double game between agencies. An operator of event contracts will tell the Ministry of Finance that the product is a financial instrument and a matter for the securities regulator, and will tell the securities regulator that it is not a financial instrument and a matter for the Ministry of Finance. ESMA has already answered that the two classifications may overlap. Poland should write that into statute: gambling classification does not depend on financial classification, and a gambling license is mandatory alongside any financial license, exactly as I proposed in May for the behavioral speculative derivative. The securities regulator, for its part, should confirm in a single communication that the national ban on binary options covers event contracts that meet the definition of a financial instrument.

Third, enforcement where the product actually lives. The obligations of Articles 15f and 15g should be extended to the app stores that distribute and settle gambling apps, and to licensed crypto-asset service providers, which should no longer process payments to unlicensed operators, just as payment-service providers may not today serve sites entered in the domain register. The American class actions against Apple, Google, and Meta over social casinos showed that distribution platforms can be sued, although the scope of their statutory immunity is still contested on appeal, much as in the matter of Drake and an offshore casino that I described separately; Polish law can do it by statute instead of by a decade of litigation.

Fourth, advertising. Article 29 already prohibits public encouragement to take part in wagers whatever words are used; it lacks two things. A statutory clause that an event contract meeting the definition of a wager is a wager for the purposes of Article 29 as well, so that the classification dispute does not stall every proceeding. And an express prohibition on calling a bet a “position,” “trading,” or an “investment” in communications with consumers, with the consumer-protection authority empowered to pursue it as a misleading practice; that is a new rule, and what justifies it is that in this product the language of investment is not decoration but the sales mechanism. Advertising was the lever of binary options; it will be the lever of event contracts.

Fifth, a harm-reduction regime beyond what Article 15i of the act already requires of licensed operators in their responsible-gaming rules: a statutory self-exclusion register shared across operators, hard deposit limits for retail clients, a cooling-off period after a large loss, and an independent audit of the behavioral architecture of every new product before it is admitted. These are the five tools of the May proposal, and none of them closes the market: the professional segment of the market, which hedges real risk, meets different criteria and stays.

The arithmetic is asymmetric. The cost of preparing is a few articles in the Gambling Act, one regulator’s statement, and one decision that this time the state will read the American record before the first Polish wave of victims rather than after it. The cost of not preparing is known to the year and to the type: it is the binary-options decade, with a federal license at the start that the Cypriot and Israeli binary-options operators never had. Binary options taught us that the state reacts after the first wave. Event contracts will test whether they taught us anything more.

What Comes Next: Three Moves That Will Decide the Case

The case is already being fought on three fronts.

The first was opened by Polymarket itself, faster than I could write this piece: according to CNBC, on September 24th it sought removal to federal court and filed a separate federal action against New York officials, the same road Kalshi took in July. I did not have either filing before me as I wrote; CNBC’s report indicates that the federal complaint rests on exclusive federal jurisdiction, so the respondent chose both terrains at once.

The second front is the federal courts. In May, I wrote that a split among the circuits is the classic road to the Supreme Court of the United States. That split now exists: on August 28th, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the dissolution of preliminary protection for Kalshi’s sports contracts in Nevada and expressly disagreed with the Third Circuit, while remanding the question of election contracts. New Jersey filed a petition for certiorari on September 2nd, docketed as No. 26-299; at the time of writing it had not been granted, and the deadline for the response had been extended to November 9th. Add the C.F.T.C.’s April suit against New York and the July ruling in New York. Four months after the May piece, the road to the Supreme Court is not shorter; it has been surveyed.

The third front is a number, not doctrine. A judge who rules for the state protects the school budget and the addiction-treatment program. A judge who rules for the platform must explain why a one-cent contract on the outcome of a reality show is a derivative within the meaning of the Commodity Exchange Act. Which of the two opinions is easier to defend on appeal is exactly what two circuits now disagree about, and I do not predict the result. Which is easier to explain to a voter is not in doubt.

For Polish law, nothing in this case changes; American classifications bind neither a Polish authority nor ESMA. What changes is the argument. Each additional jurisdiction that calls an event contract a bet hands a Polish authority one more comparative argument, and the European answer is in any case stricter than the American one: here the product need not choose between bet and financial instrument, because the two classifications may overlap, and each on its own leads to the same door: a Polish wagering permit, or none. In May, I wrote that a well-drafted statute is sometimes wiser than its author. New York shows a simpler version. It did not need a new definition. It needed an investigator with an account, three dollars and one cent, and the patience to write down what he saw. Poland, too, has a definition, and courts that have defended it four times. It has rules for domains, payment services, and advertising; it does not have rules that reach the app store, the on-chain wallet, and the foreign influencer, which are the channels through which this product will arrive. It has, instead, an experience that showed what reacting after the fact costs. The whole thesis of this piece fits in one sentence: event contracts are gambling repackaged as investment; the dispute over the name will be settled in Washington; and whether there is a flood will bae settled in Warsaw, depending on whether the legislature reads the American record before the first Polish wave of victims, or after it.

Robert Nogacki

Robert Nogacki is a Polish attorney at law (radca prawny), the founder and managing partner of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec (Skarbiec Law Firm), which has operated continuously since 2006.

The law is equal for everyone, but the parties rarely are: on one side stands an organization with time, money, and lawyers, on the other a person with one business, one nest egg, and one life.

Clients rarely come to him with a legal problem. They come with a problem that also has a legal side: an audit that began with a single invoice, money entrusted to someone who has disappeared, a company that has to be passed on before it is too late. Most such matters are decided long before the first letter is written, in decisions made without asking and in deadlines nobody remembered. So he begins by asking how the client got here, not what the client should have done.

He advises entrepreneurs and families from more than a dozen countries, including those whose accounts the tax office has just seized and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning. He defends them in tax audits, customs and fiscal inspections, disputes with the tax authorities, and criminal tax proceedings. He represents victims of investment fraud and Ponzi schemes. He helps families set up family foundations and plan succession, so that a life’s work outlasts a single generation.

Not every case can be won. Every case can be run so that the client knows where they stand. Since 2006 he has represented the victims in the WGI case (Warszawska Grupa Inwestycyjna, the Warsaw Investment Group), one of the longest criminal cases in the history of the Polish financial market, because some things must not be left half finished, even when they take two decades. In the case of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange Zonda (Zondacrypto, operated by BB Trade Estonia OÜ), he represents several hundred victims in the criminal investigation conducted by Poland’s National Prosecutor’s Office and in the Estonian bankruptcy proceedings.

Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec is listed in the rankings of Poland’s largest tax advisory firms published by Dziennik Gazeta Prawna and Rzeczpospolita, and it is a four-time recipient (2015 to 2018) of the European Medal awarded by the Business Centre Club and the European Economic and Social Committee. Robert Nogacki publishes regularly, in the press and on the firm’s website, for people who have a problem rather than a law degree, because a legal opinion the client cannot understand protects only the lawyer.

He believes that the best legal advice is the kind that means the client never has to appear in court.