On September 2, 2024, a 19-year-old was watching Karolína Muchová take control of her US Open quarterfinal against Jasmine Paolini when his $100 bet on Paolini began slipping away. So he sent a message to the USTA’s X account claiming there was a bomb inside Louis Armstrong Stadium, hoping the threat would stop or disrupt the match and prevent him from losing the wager. They didn’t, and Muchova closed it out seven minutes later. The teenager was sentenced to three years of federal probation this spring, as the fuller story surfaced this month in newly unsealed court filings. Yet now, the same tournament has put a prediction-market company’s name on its own signage.
The company Kalshi has been named the US Open’s first official prediction-market partner in a multi-year deal that put its branding across the grounds and broadcasts, while rival prediction-market platforms were barred from advertising at the event and on ESPN broadcasts. Andy Roddick, the last American man to win the US Open, had already lived through a smaller version of that kind of arrangement, and before he said a word about Kalshi, he wanted to straighten out a few things first.
Roddick gave his opinions right after Jon Wertheim said: “The kalshi deal is something the USA really needs to look into.”
“So, in order to have an opinion on this, I need to throw us under the bus first,” he began.
“All right. We did little segments inside our show last year. There were like three minutes, and we took a check from a betting company. It felt disgusting, and we said we’re never going to do it again. I didn’t like it,” said Roddick on his podcast, ‘Served with Andy Roddick’.
It was in late 2023 that Roddick signed a deal to become the face of Betway’s tennis activity. He provided his analysis and insight on major tournaments and matches through Betway’s Insider platform, launched alongside the brand’s “Advantage, Served” campaign. During an October 2025 episode of his podcast, Roddick addressed the criticism surrounding his past Betway partnership. “I am not clean of any of this,” he acknowledged, before explaining that he had worked with the betting company for two years.
“I didn’t know when you hear about the threats from the players and all that, I go, this just doesn’t feel right. Also, we have been offered on this show more money than we ever ever ever really get from these companies, and we’ve been consistent with that, which made us feel ick, and we don’t want to do it.”
Now, the Tennis Anti-Corruption Program prohibits covered persons, including players, from endorsing, being sponsored by or otherwise being engaged by a tennis betting operator. That rule drew fresh attention when Serena Williams, Coco Gauff and Aryna Sabalenka were photographed at a DraftKings-branded party in Manhattan on August 27, three days before the US Open main draw began. The ITIA confirmed it was looking into the circumstances, and according to reporting from Ben Rothenberg, the players were not paid to attend.
Retired players who are no longer Covered Persons under the TACP are not subject to the same player-specific betting restrictions. Pete Sampras has since fronted a Kalshi campaign built around his 1990 US Open run, and Maria Sharapova posted a video trading live positions on Polymarket mid-tournament, prompting tennis journalist Jon Wertheim to write that if active players can’t touch a product, “the rest of the tennis ecosystem” shouldn’t be allowed to profit from it either.
US Open’s association with Kalshi comes under more scrutiny once you consider the WTA and International Tennis Federation’s most recent Threat Matrix report, covering the 2025 season, which found angry gamblers responsible for 42 percent of all verified abuse aimed at players and 59 percent of the abuse serious enough to be escalated to law enforcement.
The tours’ first full-season report, published a year earlier, found that angry gamblers accounted for 77 percent of direct abuse reported through the player-support system, compared with 40 percent of abuse detected through open-source social-media monitoring. Jessica Pegula has pointed to that, saying tournaments profit from betting money while players “get a lot of hate on social media” because of it. Taylor Fritz made a similar complaint back in 2022, describing death threats after losses that betting companies never have to answer for.
“They launch committees with how to solve match fixing, you have committees about how to protect players from online abuse that largely stems from gamblers, I don’t know that you go be hypocritical and sign a deal that probably promotes that in a way that’s outsized. I think there is a responsibility from the leading organizations, of the people who run the US Open. I don’t know that they’re struggling for revenue streams right now. I understand their reasoning most times. Mhm. This one’s a complete f***ing miss for me,” Roddick made his verdict clear.
Roddick’s questions also trace back to a six-year Sportradar data and betting-streaming rights agreement selected by the ATP’s Tennis Data Innovations in 2023 and beginning in 2024. And this August, Polymarket became the tour’s official prediction-market provider outright, landing streaming rights to roughly 20,000 ATP Tour and Challenger matches a season, from Indian Wells to the Nitto ATP Finals.