A Kalshi esports contract at 70¢ is a claim that the thing happens 70% of the time. That is a forecast, not a promise, and the only way to know what it is really worth is to write down the price before the event and check what happened afterwards. So that is what we do, on CS2, League, Dota, Valorant, and the rest of competitive gaming.
What we measured
Kalshi esports markets priced 90–99¢ settled YES 84.0% of the time.
The price implied 95%, so this band came in 11.0 points lower than the sticker, across 50 settled markets. Total sample for this category: 3,425 settled markets at our recorded pre-event prices.
The full curve for esports
Price band
Price implied
Actually settled YES
Gap
Markets
0–9¢
5%
12.0%
+7.0
25 *
10–19¢
15%
18.0%
+3.0
133
20–29¢
25%
27.1%
+2.1
247
30–39¢
35%
33.0%
-2.0
458
40–49¢
45%
40.9%
-4.1
899
50–59¢
55%
55.9%
+0.9
676
60–69¢
65%
61.7%
-3.3
491
70–79¢
75%
71.7%
-3.3
272
80–89¢
85%
81.6%
-3.4
174
90–99¢
95%
84.0%
-11.0
50
Rows marked * have fewer than 30 settled markets behind them and are shown greyed out because they are not yet worth believing. We publish them rather than hide them so you can see the sample growing, but do not trade on a row with an asterisk.
Longshots and favourites in esports
The oldest finding in betting markets is the favourite-longshot bias: cheap contracts tend to settle less often than their price implies, and expensive ones more. Here is whether it holds in esports on Kalshi, measured rather than assumed. Contracts under 20¢ settled +3.0 points against their sticker, so longshots here have actually been underpriced, which is the opposite of the usual finding. Contracts over 80¢ settled -5.1 points against theirs, so heavy favourites have been overpriced, and buying them systematically has been a slow bleed.
A band-level average is not a forecast for any single market in front of you. It tells you what the strategy of systematically buying that band has actually returned, which is the thing people are really doing when they buy them.
How this is measured
We snapshot the price of live Kalshi markets before their events resolve, and we archive every market that settles. Joining those two records gives the only thing that answers this question honestly: what a price said, and what then happened. The numbers on this page are anchored on prices recorded about a day before each event. No survey, no model, no vibes. Markets are grouped into ten-cent bands and each band’s real settle rate is compared with the rate its price implied. We only record prices that came from a real trade or a two-sided market, never a placeholder, because a fabricated price poisons the whole dataset.
The all-category curve, the contamination checks, and the methodology in full live in the Truth Machine. To test whether your own entries beat the band you bought into, run your history through the free Trade Report. Educational, not financial advice.