The Senate Business and Labor Committee unanimously approved a bill Thursday to ban proposition betting — which involves wagering on specific events like an athlete’s performance rather than the game’s outcome — as legislators aim to clarify what they describe as a growing legal gray area.
HB243 is sponsored by Rep. Joseph Elison, R-Toquerville, and defines proposition betting as a “gambling bet on an individual action, statistic, occurrence, or non-occurrence.” After passing through the Utah House, the bill is headed to the Senate.
“It’s a huge gray area and there’s lots of lawsuits all over the country right now … debating this very thing, trying to find out what are the actual definitions,” Elison told Utah News Dispatch. “They’re flying under what’s called prediction markets, and prediction markets are regulated by the Federal Commodities Exchange. That’s why they’re able to do it.”
Utah’s Constitution already prohibits gambling, and the bill would expand the definition of gambling to explicitly include proposition betting. Regardless, there is still uncertainty about how the bill would affect prediction markets. A spokesperson for Utah House Republicans told Dispatch that the attorney general’s office will “navigate this new landscape” if the bill passes.
“Gambling used to be really clear and obvious,” Utah Attorney General Derek Brown said, describing how gambling has changed in the digital age.
“Proposition betting, generally, is starting to blur that line between traditional gambling and gambling on apps,” Brown told the committee. “Now there are a lot of apps … rather than betting on sports, for instance, they’re trying to make it look like it is a trade on the future.”
He explained the legal nuance that creates the prediction market gray area, allowing what he describes as gambling.
“You can’t bet that the Seahawks were going to win (the Superbowl), but you could trade on a potential future outcome in which the Seahawks would win,” Brown said. “Now if that sounds like a distinction without a difference, it absolutely is, in my mind, and it is gambling.”
There is growing scrutiny of prediction style markets across the country. Gov. Spencer Cox has made headlines for comments last week criticizing Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Mike Selig and saying online betting is “destroying lives.”
The bill would explicitly ban proposition betting apps like FanDuel, DraftKings, and BetMGM, which allow users to bet on specific statistics for an athlete in a game, among other things. Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket — where users can “trade on the future” — may not be affected.
“We’re not necessarily aiming at platforms, we’re aiming at the principle of not allowing proposition betting,” Elison said. “It’s a multi-hundred-billion-dollar business throughout the country, and we’re trying to address one specific thing here for the state of Utah.”
