Riot Games is reportedly in talks with Polymarket and Kalshi ahead of LoL Worlds

Zloster Published September 11, 2026

It looks like Riot Games, the company behind League of Legends and Valorant, is reportedly in talks with the two leading prediction market operators – Polymarket and Kalshi.

According to Riot’s spokesperson, prediction markets are an important part of Riot’s ecosystem. If any of these deals become a reality, the operator(s) must use data from GRID Esports. The latter is Riot’s official betting data partner.

All of these talks come just days before the beginning of the League of Legends World Championship.

A deal that people expected

Considering that Polymarket or Kalshi sign a partnership deal with Riot, it will confirm many people’s expectations. The two platforms are currently trying to land deals with the big sports leagues, such as the MLB, NHL and UFC, and Polymarket is even working alongside LeBron James.

With that said, prediction markets are also popular among esports fans. We clearly saw that during The International 2026 because a lot of players tried their luck. Both Kalshi and Polymarket already offer a lot of options for the leading esports and LoL and Valorant are among them.

It’s also worth mentioning that esports betting has grown massively in the last couple of years. According to some stats from the likes of Sportradar, LoL and Valorant alone are responsible for around $10.7B in 2024. We expect these numbers to increase further in the future because the two games are attracting more fans than before.

These kinds of sponsorship deals will become even more important in the future. Esports is one of the industries that’s struggling to be profitable from ticket and merchandise sales alone. Consequently, many of the top organizations, teams and players rely on different sponsorships to stay afloat.

Prediction Markets are Already Expanding Into Esports

A potential partnership with Riot Games will not be the first big move from the leading prediction markets into esports. In fact, both Kalshi and Polymarket have shown interest in competitive gaming.

Polymarket, for example, has partnered with GRID for its esports data. The company also works with BLAST, one of the major tournament organizers for both Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2.

In terms of Kalshi, the company mainly focuses on creating prediction markets as a mainstream sports product. As mentioned earlier, it had several esports-related markets that are also based on official competition data.

These two moves reveal that the prediction platforms no longer consider esports as a niche category. They actually see competitive gaming as a major opportunity to create new forms of fan engagement.

Featured image credit: Riot Games