Stake.us Illinois Player Moves to Vacate Arbitration Award

The Illinois player Stake.us sued to collect an arbitration award has answered the suit and asked the court to vacate that award outright. He filed the answer and the cross-application on September 7, 2026, and on September 11 the judge entered an order on both of the motions that were pending. The order's text is not on the public docket, so we cannot tell you what it does.

We reported on September 4 that Stake.us had asked a federal judge in Chicago to turn an arbitration award into a money judgment against a player who had not answered the suit. Five docket entries have landed since, and they change the shape of the case.

The case is Sweepsteaks Limited d/b/a Stake.us v. Zawadzki, No. 1:26-cv-06840, in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, before District Judge Matthew F. Kennelly. Sweepsteaks Limited is the company behind Stake.us. We read the docket directly, which is how we check everything we publish.

What has happened on the Stake.us docket since September 4?

Entry 24 is worth reading in full because it is the judge telling an unrepresented defendant how to save his own case. Having noted that the September 3 emergency motion "does not attach his proposed response to plaintiff's complaint", the court wrote: "Given that defendant has requested leave to file a response to the complaint 'instanter,' he should promptly file his proposed answer or motion to dismiss."

He did, four days later.

What is the player actually asking for?

The docket title of entry 25 sets out the whole of it. Alongside the answer and the opposition, Szymon Zawadzki filed a "CROSS-APPLICATION TO VACATE THE AWARD UNDER 9 U.S.C. § 10(a)(1)(4) AND TO REFUSE RECOGNITION UNDER ARTICLE V OF THE NEW YORK CONVENTION (9 U.S.C. § 207)", with seven exhibits.

That turns the case around. Until September 7 the only question in front of the court was how much the player owed. Now the award itself is under attack in the same proceeding.

The two grounds he names are the narrow ones Congress wrote into the Federal Arbitration Act. Section 10(a) lets a court vacate an award, and the two subsections he cites read, verbatim from the US Code: "(1) where the award was procured by corruption, fraud, or undue means" and "(4) where the arbitrators exceeded their powers, or so imperfectly executed them that a mutual, final, and definite award upon the subject matter submitted was not made."

Those are his contentions, not findings. No court has agreed with any of them, Sweepsteaks Limited has filed nothing in response to them on the public docket, and the arbitration award itself has never been published. The AAA consumer case he identifies is No. 01-24-0006-1550.

He is not the only Stake.us player asking a court to undo an award this month. Stake.us players in Massachusetts asked a federal judge on August 31 to vacate the award against them, on a separate docket and over a separate arbitration.

Did the judge rule?

An order issued on September 11, the day of the rescheduled hearing. What it holds is not public. The docket carries entry 28 with the clerk's event labels only, no description text and no downloadable document, and the free federal mirror we read has nothing more.

Read the label carefully, because it is easy to miscount. It names three orders, but there were only two motions pending. One is the operator's motion for default judgment, entry 13, filed September 2. The other is the player's emergency motion of September 3, entry 16, which asked for three things at once: to set aside the entry of default under Rule 55(c), to defer entry of default judgment, and for leave to file his responsive pleading instanter. The clerk logged that single motion under two event labels, "Leave to File Document AND Miscellaneous Relief", and those are the second and third labels on entry 28.

So the honest statement of the record today is this: on September 11 the court entered an order addressed to the operator's default-judgment motion and to the player's emergency motion, and the content is not on the public file. We are not going to infer it from the labels, and we would note that "Order on Motion" is the label this court uses whether a motion is granted, denied, or entered and continued to a later date. Judge Kennelly's earlier entries on this docket include exactly that third outcome.

We also owe readers a correction on our own earlier piece rather than a footnote here. The note we added to it on September 11 said the docket's last entry was still entry 23 from September 4. It was not. Entries 24 through 27 had been entered on September 7 and 8, and the mirror we re-read had not picked them up. That article now carries the correction.

Why does it matter that an operator sued its own player?

Arbitration clauses are sold to players as the operator's protection against being sued. This docket is the same clause running the other way: the operator finished the arbitration, won its costs, and went to a federal court to collect them from a customer who was representing himself. It is a pattern, not a one-off - Pulsz's owner sued two of its own players in Delaware over the same kind of clause. The same player has a separate suit of his own in the same courthouse, Zawadzki v. Sweepsteaks Limited, No. 1:26-cv-04478, filed in April 2026 before Judge Franklin U. Valderrama. There he moved in May for a temporary preservation order, status quo relief and limited expedited discovery; the court denied it as a temporary restraining order on May 18, without prejudice, and addressed a renewed version two days later. On September 3 he asked for the collection case to be reassigned to Judge Valderrama as the lower-numbered related case under Local Rule 40.4.

If you play at a sweepstakes casino, the practical lesson sits in your own account terms rather than in this docket. Nearly every brand we track gives you a short window, most often 30 days from signup, to opt out of arbitration in writing, and almost nobody uses it. Our Stake.us review carries the brand's litigation record in its Trust and Safety score, our Stake.us alternatives page lines up the closest brands to it, the brands at the top of our rankings show what a cleaner legal file looks like, and the operator's separate appeal of a Minnesota arbitration ruling is the bigger version of the same fight. Readers in Illinois should note this case is a contract enforcement action and not a state enforcement action, and says nothing about whether the state considers the platform lawful.

Sources & documents

• Federal docket, Sweepsteaks Limited d/b/a Stake.us v. Zawadzki, N.D. Ill. No. 1:26-cv-06840 - entries 24 to 28, read on September 12, 2026, and the source of every quotation from the docket above
• Docket-entry search for the same case - confirms entry 28 carries no description text and no available document
• Docket-entry search, Zawadzki v. Sweepsteaks Limited, N.D. Ill. No. 1:26-cv-04478 - the May 18 order denying the temporary restraining order and the September 3 reassignment motion
• 9 U.S.C. § 10, United States Code 2023 edition, US Government Publishing Office - the verbatim text of subsections (a)(1) and (a)(4)

Everything above was retrieved on September 12, 2026. We did not ask Sweepsteaks Limited for comment and have none, and we have not contacted the defendant. The arbitration award, the complaint and the parties' briefs are not in the free public file, so this piece reports the docket and the statute and nothing beyond them.

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