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How to play Hit Bar
For all the hoopla surrounding prediction markets and expectations that the industry will eat away at sportsbooks’ NFL handle this season, the old guard industry is expected to control nearly 80% of pro football wagers this year.
Eilers & Krejcik Gaming (EKG) estimates that bettors will plunk down $40.5 billion on the NFL this season through regulated channels. Traditional sportsbooks are projected to capture $31.7 billion of that total, compared to a handle analog of $8.4 billion for prediction markets—a 79% to 21% split in favor of legacy operators.
Handle analog is a metric used as a cleaner comparison between sportsbooks and prediction markets because the latter’s volume doesn’t compare evenly with sportsbook handle.
What is Hit Bar?
The absence of a feature buy is itself telling. Where much of Push Gaming’s higher-profile work leans on bonus-buy mechanics and layered features, a stripped-back jackpot title signals that the studio is content to let its classic strand stay simple.
A studio best known for high-risk, high-reward design
The broader takeaway is about range. Maintaining a dedicated sub-brand for retro-styled content lets Push Gaming serve operators looking for a spread of formats, from marquee high-volatility slots to low-key jackpot games that appeal to a different segment of players.
What is Hit Bar?
Still, Kalshi had a nine-fold lead over Polymarket, its next closest rival. Polymarket, meanwhile, led the group with 762,000 app downloads, edging Kalshi, DraftKings and FanDuel in the category. The downloads represented a 13,509% weekly increase and 25% of total category downloads, Polymarket wrote in a statement.
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.
