Underdog built a pick'em empire on a number that holds still. You tap more or less on a player, the app shows your multiplier before you commit, and the deal never moves. Underdog Predict, the company's prediction market, throws that certainty out. The number is now alive: a price set by a live market, quoted in cents, moving while you watch. So the honest Underdog Predict review question in 2026 is not whether it is legit, because the federal license answers the legit half; the state half is in court, and I get to that. It is whether a pick'em player is ready for a product where the price is the whole game. There is one translation that turns the unfamiliar screen into something a daily fantasy player already understands: the price in cents is the probability. What that translation costs you once the fees are added, and where it is legal this week, are the two things worth knowing before you fund it.
The Quick Answer
Underdog Predict is a real, CFTC-licensed sports prediction market that since July 18, 2026 has run primarily on Underdog's own federally regulated exchange (UDX), while its brokerage still clears through Kalshi, letting you buy and sell "Yes/No" event contracts on games in the same app you already use for pick'em. It is legitimate, it now has a posted fee schedule (a $0.01 per-contract broker commission plus an exchange fee that peaks at 50¢ prices), it was live in roughly 32 states at the last public tracker check on August 18 (a map Underdog does not publish, and the app changed in seven states on September 9 on the fantasy side, so run the in-app eligibility check), and there is still no welcome promo. Since this review first ran, Underdog gave up its fantasy licenses in seven states to protect the prediction-market side and sued five states, two of them on that same list, while the IG Group deal announced July 30 is still pending. How it actually works, what it really costs, where it is legal this week, and who it fits are all below.
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What Underdog Predict Actually Is In 2026
The summer changed the product more than a new tab implies. Underdog put prediction-market access inside its app back in fall 2025, but at the time it was only a storefront: the contracts you traded were listed and settled by other companies' CFTC exchanges, first Crypto.com's derivatives arm and later Kalshi. Underdog handled the app, the audience, and the sports; someone else ran the actual market.
That changed in stages. In March 2026 Underdog acquired a Designated Contract Market and a Derivatives Clearing Organization and rebranded them UDX; it is also a registered Futures Commission Merchant. Stack those three together and Underdog became, by its own description, the first sports company to hold the full set of CFTC licenses a prediction market needs to run end to end. On July 15, 2026 UDX self-certified its first sports event contracts, three baseball and three basketball templates (winner, margin and total) plus one broader catch-all, and on July 18 Underdog launched prediction markets on its own exchange. My read of that filing order: the football contracts a September reader sees were added after launch, and the deepest books on the new rails will sit where Underdog's fantasy audience already lives. "Prediction markets are largely about sports, and Underdog is the best at sports," CEO and co-founder Jeremy Levine said in announcing the move, which tells you exactly who this product is aimed at: the sports fan who was already there.
One nuance the launch headlines skipped, and it matters for the fee section later: Underdog did not throw away the old rails. Its own Predict disclosures still say event contracts "are offered by one or more designated contract markets (DCMs) including UDX, Kalshi, and Crypto.com | Derivatives North America," and the brokerage arm's July 20 regulatory disclosure lists it as a clearing member of Kalshi Klear. So the honest picture of the Underdog UDX exchange in 2026 is a company running its own market while keeping a door open to Kalshi's. Which exchange a given contract sits on is worth knowing before you tap confirm, because, as the fee section shows, the exchange sets part of what you pay.
None of that is marketing air. By IG Group's own estimate, Underdog is the third-largest US venue by regulated notional volume from September 2025 through June 2026, counting its DFS combination products alongside prediction markets, behind only Kalshi and Robinhood. Which brings up the other headline: on July 30, 2026 IG Group, the trading company, agreed to buy Underdog for up to roughly $1.3 billion, with completion expected late 2026 or early 2027 pending regulatory approval. The deal has not closed, so nothing in the app is tied to it yet, but IG said plainly that what it paid for is the license stack and a fantasy audience already converting to prediction markets, 54% of handle in the first half of 2026. Our full read on what IG Group actually bought covers the deal; the short version for this review is that the Underdog prediction market is no longer a side bet for the company, it is the company. If the category itself is new to you, our primer on how prediction markets work covers the mechanics from the ground up; the rest of this review assumes you want the Underdog-specific read.
How It Works: Contracts, Not Multipliers
On Underdog Predict you do not get a payout multiplier. You buy a contract tied to a "Yes" or "No" outcome, and every contract trades somewhere between 1¢ and 100¢ (that is, $0.01 to $1.00). If your side is right when the event resolves, each contract you hold pays out exactly $1. Your profit is the gap between what you paid and that dollar.
Buy a contract at 40¢ and, if it hits, you collect $1, a 60¢ profit on 40¢ risked. Buy the same outcome after the market has moved to 75¢ and the identical win only nets you 25¢. Same game, same result, very different return, and the difference is entirely in the price you got in at. That is the core mental model: you are not locking a multiplier, you are buying a probability and hoping you paid less than it was worth.
The translationa contract's price in cents is the market's probability. A 63¢ contract is a 63% market; a 40¢ contract is a 40% market; a 50¢ contract is a 50% coin flip. Everything else on the screen is a footnote to that single translation.
The other feature with no pick'em equivalent is that you can sell your position before the event ends. If you bought a team's "Yes" at 40¢ and it climbs to 70¢ at halftime, you can sell and bank the move without waiting to see if the outcome actually lands, the way you would trim a stock. A pick'em entry is locked the moment you submit it; a Predict contract is tradable right up until it settles, and each contract resolves Yes or No, $1 or $0, with nothing in between. Two UDX-specific details separate it from the Kalshi contract it otherwise mirrors: the exchange rounds each fee to the nearest cent (ties go to the even cent) where Kalshi rounds up, and the fee and total cost print as an exact dollar figure on the confirmation screen before you tap. Underdog covers the usual roster of sports here too, with contracts spanning the NFL, college football, the NBA and college basketball, MLB, the NHL, and soccer.
That live, sellable price is the whole reason a Predict contract behaves nothing like an Underdog pick, which is exactly where a DFS player's instincts either help or hurt.
The DFS-Player Lens: What Changes When Pick'Em Becomes A Market
If you came from the fantasy side of the app, this is the part that matters most. On Underdog pick'em, the house sets a projection and a fixed multiplier, and your only job is to decide whether the player goes over or under. The number is handed to you. On Predict, there is no house line — the price is whatever other traders have pushed it to, and it moves on news, money, and time.
Lined up side by side, the two products barely resemble each other:
| Underdog Pick'Em | Underdog Predict | |
|---|---|---|
| The Number | A fixed multiplier, shown before you enter | A live contract price (1¢–100¢) that moves |
| Who Sets It | Underdog's projection | The market — other traders |
| Payout | Multiplier on your entry | $1 per winning contract |
| Can You Exit Early? | No, locked at submit | Yes, sell any time before it settles |
| Your Edge | Beating a soft projection | Buying below the true probability |
It flips what your edge even is. In pick'em you are hunting a soft projection; in a prediction market you are hunting a soft price. The skill that carries over cleanly is the one good DFS players already have: an opinion on the real probability of an outcome, and the discipline to only act when the posted number disagrees with it. If your read says a team should be a 55% favorite and the "Yes" contract is trading at 48¢ (a 48% market), that is the same value hunt you run on a mispriced prop, just denominated in cents instead of a multiplier. The difference between prediction markets and sportsbooks is really this: one bakes its cut into a line it controls, the other lets a crowd set the price and lets you leave whenever you want.
The instinct to unlearnin pick'em you never had to watch a number after you locked it. On Predict, a price moves against you as fast as it moves for you, so the discipline is deciding your own probability before you look at the market — not letting the market tell you what to think.
I hold myself to that rule the same way we hold our own AI panel to it: every call it makes on a Kalshi contract is logged price-blind before the event and publicly graded against settlement on our AI models vs prediction markets scoreboard, where, across 1,908 settled markets as of this writing, the market is still the better forecaster. Write your number down first. Then look.
The instinct that will hurt you is treating a contract like a pick'em leg you can set and ignore. The ability to sell early is a double-edged tool: it rewards discipline and punishes the itch to trade every wiggle. Same wallet, same app, different game, and every one of those wiggles now has a posted price tag.
Where Underdog Predict Is Legal
Availability is the other half of "is Underdog Predict legit," and it moved more in the last month than in the year before it. Because UDX is CFTC-regulated rather than licensed state by state, Underdog Predict runs in roughly 32 states, a wider map than most state-licensed sportsbooks manage. Underdog itself publishes no single public list of Underdog Predict states, so that count comes from the trackers: TheLines put it at 32 live and 18 out as of August 18 (our own check for the promo-code page the same week had it at just over 30 plus Washington, D.C.), with the out column including New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Arizona, Colorado, Ohio, Maryland and Michigan, and Saturday Down South's September 1 check still had New York off.
Then Underdog forced the question. On September 5, Levine announced on X that the company would surrender its fantasy sports licenses in Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio right after the NFL kickoff on September 9, because "those states have taken a legal viewpoint we disagree with: if we offer our CFTC-licensed products we cannot offer fantasy sports in those states. So we had to choose." Read that again from a Predict user's chair. Six of those seven states sat on TheLines' not available list two and a half weeks earlier, and Underdog just gave up its fantasy business in them to keep offering its CFTC-licensed products. Which product is switched on where is exactly the thing the company has not published, so the in-app eligibility check is the only answer that counts, and it is worth re-running the week you read this.
Three days later, on September 8, Underdog filed suits in Ohio, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, New Mexico and Washington, asking each federal court for a permanent injunction stopping the state from enforcing its gambling laws against a CFTC-regulated market. "We need the Supreme Court to decide whether we'll have one, enforceable federal standard or state-by-state regulation," Stacie Stern, Underdog's senior vice president of government affairs and partnerships, told Sports Betting Dime. That is the honest legal status of this product in September 2026: federally licensed, state-contested, and litigating it.
The fine print you should actually read sits in the brokerage arm's own July 20, 2026 disclosure: if courts decide certain states can restrict these contracts, open sports positions for customers in those states "may become untradeable," and "customers may be unable to close their positions, or positions could be liquidated prematurely." That is not a scare line, it is the company describing its own risk in the plain terms regulators require, and it is the single best reason not to hold a large position in a state that is mid-lawsuit. You must be a U.S. resident, and Underdog Predict's own baseline is 18+, younger than the 21+ most sportsbooks require. Third-party trackers put the whole-app minimum higher in a few states (19+ in Alabama and Nebraska, 21+ in Virginia among others), and none of those tables is written for Predict specifically, so confirm your state's minimum in-app. Treat the map above as current, not permanent, and understand that whether prediction markets are legal is a moving question, not a settled one. None of this is legal advice.
Play responsibly.Underdog Predict is real-money trading, so only put up money you can afford to lose, and never chase a loss with a bigger position. If it stops being fun, step away. Call or text 1-800-GAMBLER if you need help. Must be of eligible age in a state where Underdog Predict operates.
Worked Example: Reading A Contract Price Like A DFS Player
Run a hypothetical one. Say Underdog Predict posts an NFL team's "Yes" (they win the game) at 63¢. The first thing to do is the translation from the top, and it is one step: a contract's price in cents is its implied probability. 63¢ means the market thinks that outcome is about a 63% shot. That is the whole trick, and once you see it, the screen stops being foreign.
From there you can put it in the language you already read. A 63% implied probability is roughly -170 in American odds, the same as laying $170 to win $100. The same conversion runs across the board: a 40¢ contract is a 40% shot (about +150), and a 75¢ contract is a 75% favorite (about -300). Now the value question is identical to the one you run on any prop: does your number say this team is better than 63%? If your model has them at 70%, the contract is cheap and you have an edge; if your read is 58%, the market is charging you more than the outcome is worth and you pass.
| What You See | What It Means | The DFS Translation |
|---|---|---|
| Contract At 63¢ | ~63% implied probability | About -170 in American odds |
| Your Read: 70% | Market is underpricing it | Value — the number is soft |
| Your Read: 58% | Market is overpricing it | No bet — you'd be overpaying |
The row that decides it is the middle one: value only exists when your probability is higher than the price. That is the same disagreement you hunt when a fantasy projection looks a half-point off, just measured in cents. If you want to sanity-check how a contract's price lines up against what a sportsbook is quoting on the same game, our free odds calculator takes a prediction-market price in cents and returns the American, decimal and implied-probability versions in one step, so you can see instantly whether the market or the book is giving you the better number. That comparison — contract price versus book price on the same outcome — is the closest thing to an edge the crossover audience has, and it costs nothing to run.
Now finish the example with the part the screen adds at confirmation. Buy 100 of those 63¢ contracts and you stake $63. Underdog's brokerage commission is $0.01 a contract, so $1.00. The exchange fee is 0.07 × 100 × 0.63 × 0.37, which rounds to $1.63. Total friction: $2.63. If the team wins you collect $100, so your profit is $34.37 instead of the $37 the price alone implied, and your real break-even is not 63% but about 65.6%, roughly -191 rather than -170. Your 70% read still clears that bar comfortably; a 65% read that looked like a thin edge at the quoted price is, after fees, no edge at all. So the fee schedule is not a footnote on this platform.
What It Costs, And The Offer (Or Lack Of One)
The first thing to be straight about is a correction to what this review said in August. Underdog does publish its fees; they just live on two legal pages instead of a marketing one, and they stack. As of September 11, 2026:
- Brokerage Commission (UDM, LLC fee schedule, PDF dated February 12, 2026; the legal center's version label reads March 16): $0.01 per contract, per side, charged when you open a position and again if you close it by selling early. Ten contracts in and ten out is $0.20 in commission, and the exchange fee below is charged again on the exit too. Hold to settlement and, by the schedule's wording, there is no second trade to be charged on.
- Exchange Fee (UDX fee schedule, PDF effective September 11, 2026; the legal center's version label reads September 10): a taker fee of round(0.07 × contracts × price × (1 − price)), so it is largest at 50¢ and shrinks toward either end of the price range. Resting orders pay a maker fee at a quarter of that rate, 0.0175 instead of 0.07, charged only if the resting order actually fills.
If that second formula looks familiar, it should: it is the same shape Kalshi prints, coefficient for coefficient (the one difference is rounding: UDX rounds to the nearest cent, Kalshi rounds up), and our Kalshi fees breakdown walks the arithmetic in detail. Here is what it does to a 100-contract taker order on Underdog Predict across the price range, held to settlement so the commission lands once, using nothing but the two posted schedules:
| Contract Price | Stake (100 contracts) | UDX Taker Fee | UDM Commission | Total Fees | Share Of Stake |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20¢ (20%) | $20.00 | $1.12 | $1.00 | $2.12 | 10.6% |
| 40¢ (40%) | $40.00 | $1.68 | $1.00 | $2.68 | 6.7% |
| 50¢ (50%) | $50.00 | $1.75 | $1.00 | $2.75 | 5.5% |
| 63¢ (63%) | $63.00 | $1.63 | $1.00 | $2.63 | 4.2% |
| 90¢ (90%) | $90.00 | $0.63 | $1.00 | $1.63 | 1.8% |
The row I keep coming back to is the 20¢ line. The exchange fee is smallest on longshots, but the flat penny commission does not care what the contract costs, so the two together eat more than a tenth of a cheap stake. And that table is the hold-to-settlement case. Use the exit door and you pay both tolls again: buy 100 contracts at 20¢ ($1.12 exchange fee plus $1.00 commission) and sell them at 30¢ ($1.47 plus $1.00) and the round trip costs $4.59 on a $20 stake, about 23%, on a trade that won: the 10¢ move was $10 of gross profit, and fees took 46% of it. A pick'em player used to a fixed multiplier on a longshot leg has never paid a toll like that, and it is the single clearest argument for placing a resting order at your price and being the maker rather than crossing the spread: on the 63¢ example the exchange fee drops from $1.63 to $0.41, with the catch that a resting order only pays a fee because it filled, and one that never fills leaves you with no position at all. On the confirmation screen, the fee shows as an exact dollar figure before you tap, so the arithmetic here is a way to know what it should say, not a substitute for reading it. The Predict promo-code page covers the offer side (and confirms there is none).
Second, the promotion, and this is where an honest review beats an affiliate pitch. As of this writing, Underdog has not released a welcome offer or promo code for Predict. Its own Predict page carries eligibility rules and risk language and no offer, and the two most recent trackers I checked (August 18 and August 31) found the same thing. Anyone quoting you an "Underdog Predict promo code" today is almost certainly recycling a code from Underdog's separate fantasy pick'em game, which runs on entirely different terms. We do not have an affiliate relationship on Predict, so treat this piece as information rather than a sign-up pitch: the value here is understanding the product, not a bonus. Deposits, for what it is worth, run through debit and credit cards (Apple Pay included) and Trustly bank transfers with a $10 minimum; PayPal funds the fantasy side of the app but not Predict.
Honest Pros And Cons
Pros
- A real CFTC-licensed prediction market on rails Underdog owns outright (the full DCM+DCO+FCM stack), third in the US by regulated volume by its buyer's own count (prediction markets and DFS combination products together) — regulated infrastructure, not a gray-area sweepstakes product.
- The fees are posted, formulaic, and small on favorites: a 90¢ contract costs under 2% of stake in total friction, and maker orders cut the exchange fee to a quarter.
- The market is hard to beat, and we can show it: across 1,908 settled Kalshi contracts our AI panel's blend scored a Brier of 0.167 to the market's 0.157, which is exactly why a disciplined number you write down before you look is worth more than any model's.
- Live in roughly 32 states as of the mid-August tracker count, wider than any single state-licensed book (confirm your state on Underdog's eligibility check).
- 18+ at the baseline, with the higher state minimums confirmed in-app rather than guessed from a sportsbook's rules.
- You can sell contracts before an event resolves, which no pick'em entry lets you do — an exit door a fantasy lineup never had.
- It lives inside the app a huge fantasy audience already has, with one login and one wallet, so the switching cost from pick'em is almost nothing (except in the seven states where Underdog surrendered its fantasy licenses and shut down Drafts, all draft products including best ball, on September 9).
Cons
- No welcome offer or promo code on the prediction-market side, so there is no bonus to soften a first deposit.
- It is a different, more volatile product than pick'em: the price keeps moving after you buy, which a player used to a locked entry has never had to manage, and choosing between resting at your price (cheaper, may not fill) and crossing the spread (fills, four times the exchange fee) is a skill pick'em never asked for.
- The state map is contested in court right now, with Underdog suing five states in September, and the company's own disclosure warns that open positions in a state that wins could become untradeable.
- Which exchange a contract sits on (UDX, or Kalshi through the brokerage's clearing membership; the Crypto.com link was not operational as of the July 20 disclosure) is not something the app headlines, and the IG Group sale means the owner is about to change.
The Verdict
The pitch is that Underdog, the best-known name in sports pick'em, now runs its own federally licensed prediction market, and the license is real: this is a legitimate, regulated product, not a scam and not a sweepstakes dodge. But "legit" was never the interesting question. The interesting question was whether a pick'em player is ready to trade a live price instead of tapping a fixed multiplier, and the answer is that you are ready the moment you internalize the one thing this review keeps returning to: the cents are the probability. A 63¢ contract is a 63% market, and after the posted fees your real bar is closer to 65.6%; your only job is to know when your own number clears it. That is the same value hunt you already run, wearing different clothes and paying a small, published toll.
So who should open it? If you are a DFS player who already thinks in probabilities and wants the flexibility to buy, sell, and shop a number the house does not control, Predict is a natural next step, and the fact that it is baked into an app you already use lowers the friction to almost nothing. If you want a bonus to chase, a fixed multiplier you can set and forget, or you live in one of the states currently fighting Underdog in court, this is not your moment, either because the offer is not there or the ground is still moving. Either way, verify your own state first, start small, price the contract before you buy it, and read the fee line on the confirmation screen. For where Underdog Predict sits against the rest of the field, our rundown of the best prediction-market platforms ranks the major names, the Kalshi review covers the category's biggest exchange, and the sports prediction markets hub tracks how the whole space is moving. Before you commit real money to any of them, it is worth reading the prediction-market fine print so the settlement rules never surprise you.
Play responsibly and only with money you can afford to lose. Prediction-market trading carries real risk, including the loss of the funds you put up. Eligibility, minimum age, and available states vary and can change, and terms apply. If it stops being fun, step away, and if you or someone you know has a gambling problem, call or text 1-800-GAMBLER or visit ncpgambling.org/chat.
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