Of course, none of this indicates who’ll win anything. It tells you where the money goes, which isn’t the same thing at all.
Racing’s flat-cap image hides a serious betting machine, and it broke records again over the past 12 months.
Start in Hong Kong. The Jockey Club took $18.30 billion on racing in the 2025/26 season, up 3.2% on the year before. A record $4.39 billion of that came from punters overseas betting into Hong Kong’s pools, up 8.3%.
That overseas money is where Royal Ascot comes in. Ascot runs on World Pool, the Hong Kong-run system that lets punters on different continents bet into one shared pot. The 2025 meeting took around $201 million through World Pool, 10% up on 2024 and only about 2% short of the 2022 record. Across 2025 as a whole, World Pool turnover on races outside Hong Kong rose 20% to $1.19 billion over 57 race days. There’s no full-meeting World Pool figure for Royal Ascot 2026 yet.
Not that 2026 was plain sailing. Coral and Ladbrokes said staking came in a little under expectation, and blamed the World Cup running alongside it. Then 13 winning favorites made it an expensive week for the bookies. Not a week to be a bookmaker.
Down under, the race that stops a nation stopped it harder than ever. A record $72.7 million went on the 2025 Melbourne Cup, beating the 2021 record of $157.6 million, and Cup Day as a whole took a record $267 million. Racing Victoria says the Cup takes more than four times the turnover of any other Australian race. The 2026 renewal isn’t run until November, so 2025 is still the latest result (November is stretching the definition of summer, granted, but it’s too big to leave out).
With the NBA and NHL done and the NFL not back yet, baseball carries the American betting calendar through July and August. The 2026 MLB season opened on 25 March with the Giants vs. Yankees, the earliest traditional Opening Day the league has staged, and runs to 162 games before the October World Series.
The state reports show how much of the summer it soaks up. In Missouri, live only since December 2025, baseball was more than half of all July handle (the total amount staked). That’s well clear of multi-leg parlays at $79.6 million, and soccer at $36.9 million in a World Cup year. Indiana’s July report put baseball at 17.3% of handle, with a big chunk of the month’s money going on NFL futures that won’t settle until the new year.
It wasn’t all one-way traffic for the sportsbooks, mind. Nevada’s baseball win in June 2026 came to $17.9 million, down 19.4% on a record June 2025, and the home World Cup pulled casual money towards football through June and July. But a game every day, deep player-prop markets and new wrinkles like the 2026 automated ball-strike challenge system keep baseball the backbone of U.S. summer betting.
No sport changed shape more this year than cricket.
Its betting heartland is India, where the Think Change Forum reckons cricket drives 80%-90% of all sports betting revenue, almost all of it offshore and unregulated. In August 2025, India passed the PROG Act, a blanket ban on real-money online games, and enforcement landed just as IPL 2026 got going.
What followed was a season like no other. Betting demand on the opening match, RCB vs. Sunrisers Hyderabad, was the highest for an IPL opener in nine seasons of Blask tracking. Then it fell for seven weeks straight. Authorities had blocked around 8,400 betting sites and apps before a ball was bowled, and told VPN providers to cut access.
You’ll still see big headline numbers for IPL betting floating about. Take them with a pinch of salt. Because almost all of that betting is illegal, they’re estimates, not reported figures.
In England, the cricket summer was as busy as ever. India’s men played five T20Is and three ODIs between July 1-19, then The Hundred ran from July 21 to Finals Day at Lord’s on Aug. 16. The rebranded franchises included defending champions MI London, formerly Oval Invincibles.
Tennis could have been designed with in-play betting in mind. Momentum swings on grass make live betting especially popular at Wimbledon, and UK bookmakers price up hundreds of markets on the event, from match and set betting to totals.
The 2026 Championships gave in-play punters plenty to work with. The women’s draw was blown open early when Aryna Sabalenka, Iga Swiatek and Elena Rybakina all went out, reshuffling the outright market mid-tournament. British wildcard Arthur Fery went all the way to the men’s semi-finals before Alexander Zverev ended the run.
In the end, though, the favorites largely delivered. World No. 1 Jannik Sinner beat Novak Djokovic in straight sets in the semis, then came from a set down to beat Zverev 6-7, 7-6, 6-3, 6-4 and keep his title, his fifth Grand Slam. The bookmakers’ headline offers for the fortnight included retirement-rule guarantees and in-play insurance.
Over in the U.S., prediction-market platforms now list tennis, too, with Grand Slam markets drawing the most volume.
Golf doesn’t have baseball’s daily volume, but the four majors bring a proper betting bonanza, and 2026 was a year for long shots. Rory McIlroy took The Masters, Aaron Rai the PGA Championship and Wyndham Clark the US Open before the final major at Royal Birkdale.
The Masters set the tone in April. At Betway, Bryson DeChambeau drew 16% of all outright bets, more than any other player, while favorite Scottie Scheffler drew 9%.
Then came The Open. New Zealand’s Ryan Fox, priced at 200-1 with Caesars and 150-1 to 170-1 elsewhere, equaled the all-time major record with a third-round 62 and birdied the 72nd hole to win. He finished a shot ahead of Cameron Young, with defending champion and favorite Scheffler tied fourth. Fox banked $3.2 million for it, and he was the second huge outsider to win a men’s major this year.
That’s golf betting in a nutshell. Even the favorite is up against a whole field, and the big prices land just often enough to keep everyone interested.
The bookmakers keep finding new angles, too, such as Entain’s “nearest the pin” market on every par three at Augusta.
Summer 2026 showed again that the “quiet season” is a myth. Racing set turnover records in Hong Kong and at Flemington. Baseball carried U.S. sportsbooks through July. Cricket stayed a betting giant even as India’s ban hit IPL demand. Tennis lived on in-play action through Wimbledon, and golf served up a 200-1 shock at Royal Birkdale.
The World Cup took the headlines. These five kept punters busy before, during and after it. So next time someone tells you summer is quiet for betting, point them at a racecard, a box score, a scorecard or a leaderboard.
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All data is accurate as of Oct. 19, 2026, and comes from the sources listed below, with each figure cited where it appears. This update replaces the previous version’s global “share of betting revenue” estimates with event- and regulator-level figures, because no comparable 2026 global breakdown has been published. The old IPL betting estimate and the 2023 cricket market valuation were removed because they couldn’t be verified for 2026.
Currency conversion. Figures reported in other currencies were converted to U.S. dollars at these rates for Oct. 19, 2026:
Where a source already gave a U.S. dollar figure (for example, Hong Kong Jockey Club turnover), that figure was used. Converted figures are rounded and will differ slightly from those quoted at the time of each event.
This story was produced by OLBG and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.