Los Angeles gambling clinicians say they are seeing more young patients with gambling problems, and several of them blame prediction markets such as Kalshi. Their accounts point to sports-minded users, rapid online trading and, in some cases, minors or young adults slipping into gambling behavior for the first time.
In an interview with LAist, Dan Field, a licensed social worker and clinical director of Westside Gambling Treatment, said he is seeing “a lot more young sports bettors” who go straight to Kalshi and get “sucked in very easily.” He said one patient moved to California hoping sports-betting laws would help manage recovery, stayed largely gambling-free for almost two years, and then resumed gambling after Kalshi took off.
Dr. Timothy Fong, the addiction psychiatrist who co-directs UCLA’s Gambling Studies program, said the clinic has “definitely seen an increase” in people coming into treatment as prediction markets have grown. For many of them, he said, online prediction markets were their first gambling experience, and some had never set foot in a brick-and-mortar casino, coming to the platforms because of interest in sports and investing rather than betting.
The clinicians described features they said made the apps hard to ignore. Yisroel Solomon said prices update almost instantaneously, creating extra dopamine, fear of missing out and chasing. Field called constant price checking “incredibly attention-grabbing and addictive,” while Jacob Hofflich said the app looks “like the stock market,” with flashing green and red lines and a running log of bets.
Access is part of the story. According to the LAist report, prediction markets are available to users as young as 18 because the platforms do not have to follow California’s minimum gambling age. Experts also said aggressive advertising has helped Kalshi reach the 18- to 20-year-old demographic, and Field said he had seen ads set in a college-bar scene that showed people partying and betting.
The clinicians said younger users can go further still. Deborah Buhaj, a gambling addiction therapist in Los Angeles, said parents have contacted her after they “suddenly don’t recognize their 22-year-old” once they started using Kalshi. Fong said some patients under 18 get around ID checks by using their parents’ credentials, and that he is working with a 14-year-old whose mother opened a Kalshi account for him, thinking it was a video game. He compared giving minors access to prediction markets with giving them access to guns, prescription drugs or cannabis.
Kalshi, meanwhile, said its trading volume has been rising sharply. Jack Such, a company spokesperson, said it has been “going up and up and up” over the past three months, and rejected the idea that Kalshi itself was the entity changing availability from 21 to 18.
The LAist report also placed the issue in a wider California context. Sports betting is illegal in the state, but prediction markets were described as not illegal because users buy and sell contracts with one another rather than betting against a house, and the report said California has not brought legal action against them. It said Kalshi accounts for about 90% of the U.S. prediction-market share, and that $1.1 billion worth of Kalshi World Cup contracts were trading at the time.
The broader gambling backdrop in California is already severe. The UCLA Center for Health Policy Research said about 1 in 4 California adults, or 7.2 million people, gambled in the past year, and 488,000 of them reported symptoms of problem gambling. The survey, which added gambling questions in 2023, also found that gamblers were more likely to report binge drinking, smoking, vaping and substance use. Among past-year gamblers, 112,000 said they needed help with living expenses because of gambling, 274,000 said they hid how much they gambled from friends or family, and only 28.2% of adults with symptoms said they saw a health care provider for mental health or alcohol or drug use in the past year.
