Runaway Chicken: Epic Escape

What is Runaway Chicken: Epic Escape?

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 Runaway Chicken: Epic Escape?

“Japan is acting cautiously, after observing missteps from other jurisdictions. They are proceeding in the way that best suits them,” she adds.

The factor that led some operators to drop out of the licensing race could be the “uncertainty” created by regulations that “didn’t seem set in stone”, says Leckert.

“Some of them [investors] that were looking at Japan were looking at a big IR licence or nothing. With Tokyo and Yokohama being out of the mix, maybe some weren’t as interested anymore and decided to sit back, and wait and see how regulation and licensing shake out.”

How to play Runaway Chicken: Epic Escape

“The combined entity will be able to deliver the same rate of growth and the same rate of shareholder distribution, but with a larger pro forma free float and liquidity,” Angelozzi outlined.

“So you get the same stable and predictable growth and you get the capital returns. You get no additional risk, and you get the benefits of the new markets and the online opportunities on top of the synergies, which are also pretty significant. So that’s why this makes a lot of sense to us.”

Cirsa CEO Antonio Hostench echoed Angelozzi’s confidence, adding: “On our side, we see this as a great opportunity because as Guglielmo said, there is no overlap between the companies, almost no overlap.