Kalshi vs the sportsbooks
Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange — its prices float on supply and demand, with no house edge baked in. US sportsbooks set their own lines and bake in vigorish (the “vig”). After de-vigging book odds, the two markets often disagree by 1–10%+, especially on smaller games and futures.
Side-by-side comparisons
Why compare Kalshi to sportsbooks?
Kalshi's peer-to-peer pricing model creates legitimate edges when its market disagrees with the consensus across major US sportsbooks. A 3% edge on a moneyline is meaningful; a 5%+ edge is rare and usually profitable over time. SportsBookISH refreshes every Kalshi market against 11+ sportsbooks every 5 minutes so you can spot these gaps in real time.
What about Pinnacle or Bookmaker?
We currently track US-licensed books available via The Odds API. Pinnacle / Bookmaker are offshore and not in the dataset. We use the median across the books we do track as the “sharp” reference — it's less precise than a Pinnacle line but available legally and updates more reliably for the markets Kalshi covers.
How to interpret “edge”
We compute the de-vigged implied probability for each side at each book, take the median across books, then subtract Kalshi's implied probability. Positive numbers mean Kalshi is pricing the outcome cheaper than the books — a buy edge. Negative means Kalshi is overpriced. Edges under 1.5% are usually noise; 3%+ is actionable; 5%+ is rare and worth investigating.