Bet Bash 2026: A Bettors’ Conference Becomes a Market-Structure Venue

Bet Bash ran 4-7 August at Circa Resort & Casino in downtown Las Vegas, its sixth edition. It is hosted by Gadoon “Spanky” Kyrollos, a professional sports bettor, and it has never pretended to be a trade show. The organisers describe an audience of 700-900 people who work in professional gambling. The Las Vegas Review-Journal counted 24 seminars, six live podcasts and two expert panels across the four days, alongside open bars, watch parties at Stadium Swim and a puzzle hunt with $10,000 in prizes. There is a Sports Gambling Hall of Fame induction.

None of that is where operators should be looking.

Who was on the prediction markets panel

The published programme scheduled a session on Friday morning titled “Prediction Markets – A Legal Analysis.” The panellists were Josh Sterling and Howard Glaser. The moderator was Shawn Fluharty.

Take those three in turn, because the combination is the story.

Joshua B. Sterling ran the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Market Participants Division from 2019 to 2021. That division supervises the registered intermediaries — the futures commission merchants and the rest of the roughly 3,300 banks, brokers and asset managers cleared to carry customer business into US derivatives markets. He is now a partner at Milbank. If you want someone who knows how customer orders are legally permitted to reach a federally regulated exchange, that is the job description.

Howard Glaser is Global Head of Government Affairs and Counsel at Light & Wonder — a supplier, not an operator, and therefore a party with an interest in every distribution channel at once.

Shawn Fluharty is a sitting West Virginia delegate and president of the National Council of Legislators from Gaming States. He is one of the people who will write the state-level response, and NCLGS has already spent 2026 asking what lawmakers can do about sports prediction markets.

The same morning, Fluharty also moderated a “Regulator Roundtable” with Christopher Schroder and Tom Sage. An hour after that, a “Market Making” panel with Nick Smith, Shane Sigsbee and Ronan McDonagh.

What that agenda is telling you

A conference built by and for sharp bettors devoted its final morning to federal derivatives law, state regulators and market making. Not to handicapping.

That is not a programming accident, and the reason is structural. The bettors in that room are the customers sportsbooks limit or refuse. An exchange or a prediction market does not limit a winning customer, because it is not taking the other side of the wager. So the constituency with the sharpest commercial reason to care whether event contracts survive a legal challenge is precisely the constituency Bet Bash convenes — and the venue where that argument is now being had is a bettors’ conference, not a trade show.

For operators the practical consequence is narrow and worth naming. The people drafting the state response, the supplier lobbying across every channel, and the former regulator of the intermediaries are all now working the same question in the same room. Whatever consensus forms in rooms like that one tends to arrive later as model legislation.

What we are not claiming

We attended none of these sessions and we have seen no reporting of what was said in them. Everything above is drawn from the conference’s own published programme, the Review-Journal’s preview, and the public professional records of the named participants. We are reading an agenda, which is evidence of what organisers thought worth scheduling — and nothing more than that.

If the substance of those panels is reported, it will be worth revisiting. The scheduling alone already tells operators something: the market-structure fight over event contracts has moved past the trade press and into the room where the people who lose money to sportsbook limits spend their weekend.