Tom Reeg says company has weathered similar crisis before

Tom Reeg said it plainly enough: they had lived through this before.

Daily fantasy sports operated in a gray market for years before PASPA fell, and the companies that ran those platforms walked into the regulated sports betting market with customer bases, technology, and brand recognition that the casinos had to spend years buying back. Reeg's point, made from a panel stage at the Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas, was that he could see the same film running again — and that Caesars is prepared to enter prediction markets, but only once it can do so without touching its gaming licences.

That caveat is doing enormous work. MGM's Bill Hornbuckle was more direct about what the caveat means in practice: Nevada regulators have told MGM explicitly that moving into prediction markets in other states would affect its licensing suitability. That is not a legal opinion from outside counsel — that is the regulator speaking to the operator about its own suitability. Hornbuckle said MGM considered entry after the sector expanded into sports in early 2025, and walked away quickly once that conversation happened.

So the two largest casino operators on the Las Vegas Strip are watching DraftKings and FanDuel run into a space that Reeg has essentially described as the daily fantasy sports window of 2012 — chaotic, legally contested, and potentially very valuable to whoever survives it. The difference is that this time, the people who can see the parallel most clearly are the ones who cannot participate.

What this actually prices, for anyone trading on how the competitive landscape resolves, is not the legal question. Courts and the CFTC are fighting about jurisdictional authority, preemption, and whether event contracts are swaps. That fight will take years. What Reeg and Hornbuckle have just told the market is that the incumbents with the deepest customer relationships and the strongest balance sheets are functionally sidelined — not by legal risk but by regulatory leverage that Nevada already holds over them.

The AGA's Bill Miller called prediction market operators well-funded bad guys who had kicked in the back door. He is not wrong that they have moved fast and paid no state gaming taxes. He is probably wrong that the industry's legal fight will succeed cleanly. The CFTC's rulemaking — two measures now at the White House for review, one of which could take effect while comment is still being collected — is an attempt to settle federally what the courts have refused to settle cleanly. If that succeeds even partially, the tax and regulatory arbitrage that operators like Kalshi and Polymarket have been running becomes permanent structural advantage.