Opinion market advocates say it’s a game of skill, face civil society opposition

Real money gaming firms explore prediction markets, challenging the legal status of opinion trading as skill-based gaming.

Real money gaming firms — an industry that allows users to risk money on fantasy sports, poker, rummy and so on — are dipping their toes into prediction markets, allowing users to wager on the outcome of real world events. With this new shift, firms like Probo are trying to emulate the legal successes of other firms whose offerings have been upheld as legitimate in courts.

In the past week, two papers argued that prediction markets (or “opinion trading”) are skill-based activities.

If courts agree with this assessment — supported by an IIT Delhi professor-authored study commissioned by Probo and a policy paper by the Delhi-based Evam Law & Policy — then betting on real life events, long seen as a gambling, would instead be classified as gaming, hampering States’ ability to curb such firms from soliciting bets from players.

Prediction markets are structured in a straightforward way: two or more groups of people wager on whether an event will happen or not, and after the platform hosting the wager takes a cut, the pooled money is distributed to the group whose prediction comes true. For instance, Probo’s opinion trading platform is accepting bets on the value of Bitcoin later in the day, whether the Dow Jones composite will reach a certain value, the outcome of the next Indian Premier League match, and even the result of a match in the Pakistan Super League, which is not even streamed in India.

In the Probo-commissioned paper co-authored with an employee of the company, Amitabha Bagchi, a professor of computer science at IIT Delhi, assessed that “opinion trading is a skill-based game,” and said that data analysed from Probo supported this conclusion. The authors reasoned that characteristics that apply to games of skill — such as a “gradient” among users, with some outperforming others consistently, and of individual players getting better over time — apply to opinion trading.

The question is likely to be settled by legislation. While betting on sports directly is regulated by States (under the “betting and gambling” clause in the Constitution), at least three high courts have upheld the legality of daily fantasy sports, where players assemble their own rosters and teams, and real life performance impacts the outcome of their assembled rosters.

It remains to be seen whether prediction markets will withstand similar legal challenges. The Bombay High Court is hearing pleas against opinion trading. While, in March, the Supreme Court directed the Gujarat HC to reconsider a PIL on the matter that it had dismissed earlier. The New Indian Consumer Initiative (NICI), a civil society group, has urged the government to ban opinion trading outright.