My Polymarket shame
Here’s a nice move for dinner parties. Asked how work is going, deliver only a cool “quite well”, then make your excuses and quit the scene. The table should erupt in your wake, as outraged diners ask how the hell your interrogator could not have known of your various and fabulous successes. It goes wrong if your fellow diners just say, “Sorry you were beside him, was he talking about his Substack again?”
But it works beautifully, I am told, for Shayne Coplan. Apparently, the 28-year-old New Yorker’s departure leaves the table a furious cauldron of incredulity. “Did you really just ask how his work is going?!” others say. “He’s the youngest self-made billionaire in the world! He made, er, an online market, or like a political betting site, or I think someone said it’s like a machine that predicts the future?!”
It is all of those things, after a fashion. Coplan founded Polymarket, the online prediction market where users trade shares in future events. You bet on an outcome at a price determined by the volume of cash other users have committed to and against that outcome. The price, for instance, on Barcelona winning the Champions league is currently seven cents on the dollar. But Polymarket won its fame for stakes much less conventional than sports games: betting on world events. Fortune reported that 85 per cent of online wagers on the 2024 US election were made on Polymarket. And the present war in Iran supplied the platform’s record numbers. “US strikes Iran by…?” brought $529m in bets, $89m on the day the Ayatollah was killed alone.
Some of the winners in there have attracted suspicion. Donald Trump Jr joined Polymarket’s advisory board in August 2025. Several outlets reported on the timing of user “Magamyman”’s bet on Ali Khamenei’s death, which earned $553,000. And a group of traders made a lot of money out of some very well-timed bets on the ceasefire between America and Iran that was declared on Tuesday night (7 April). Polymarket’s meta-ethical pitch is that it harnesses and harmonises raw self-interest for the sake of synthesising truth. Barcelona being at 7 cents means Barcelona have a 7 per cent chance. On Elon Musk’s X, Polymarket odds are used as the best forecast of future events. The logic follows that people are never more honest than when their money is on the line, that the crowd has its genius and that sharing genius honesty is worthwhile, even virtuous.
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The Iranian conflagration – a gamble in itself – made the world feel a lot riskier. Experts made chilling predictions of global economic catastrophe and an “everything shock” to the cost of living. I took out $102, at that stage equivalent to a barrel of Brent crude oil, and 44 per cent up on the same time last year, to see if Polymarket could help me beat the spike and stay afloat.
An immediate challenge was that Polymarket is not accessible in the United Kingdom. Students of Britain’s Online Safety Act will recall that the UK government can block regional access to websites. You will remember that simple, cheap VPN apps offer no way around these restrictions because Peter Kyle, well, asked people not to use them. To use Polymarket I, er… swam to Ireland a few days later, and cracked open my laptop on the gorgeous shores of County Cork.
Polymarket exhibits straight away the tell of a cutting-edge website: rather than creating a password for your account, a verification code is sent to your email. Having entered, you are faced with a vivid dashboard of different bets, each with outcomes, percentage likelihoods, cash volumes. The Market Context tab explains gambles with “experimental AI-generated summary referencing Polymarket data”. My market category options started: “All”, “Trump”, “Iran” and “Oil”.
On 1 April, Trump announced an address about his action in Iran for that evening. I clicked onto a market about “What will Trump say during Address to the Nation on April 1?”. There were a variety of words and phrases to bet on or against. To me, “obliterated” at 79 cents looked about right, but 47 cents for “God” three or more times looked underpriced. I bought that, and also bet that the president would not say “six-seven”.
The next morning, both my wagers had come good. Brent crude had climbed to $111, but my portfolio was at $123. I was ahead and my mind swiftly flooded, as after buying my first lottery ticket or the GameStop short squeeze of 2021, with visions of financial release: freedom from the humiliation of Tube commutes; never again hating commuters for not moving down in the middle of the carriage, TfL for making me hate the commuters, or myself for being so fragile.
But such wealth was a long way off, and I knew that not all the Polymarketeers outpacing me seemed to be playing fair, in ways that might have gone beyond just asking AI to help judge bets. There had already been several reports of suspected insider trading. All being fair in love and betting on wars, I decided to try some myself. In the afternoon, I saw a market for “Highest temperature in London on April 2?”. The odds were 97 per cent on 12˚C. I had just sampled the London air (having swum there and back for my lunchtime stroll). I knew it to be no higher than 10˚C, and that the day’s hottest moment was past. So I took out a position against 12˚C, on which I stood to multiply my stake 50 times over.
Unfortunately, my next check revealed that it had already been 12˚C that day, in the night, just after midnight and the day turned, while I had been asleep. In fact, the graph showed the volume pouring in on 12˚C as soon as the hour struck. The historic odds chart showed a sharp, clinical rise. It seemed to suggest that I was not competing against just other punters, but plenty of computerised agents, trained to relevant data sources. Polymarket does sort of belong to that techy world. Its gambles are not totally representative of humanity’s interest in the future. It concentrates on the zone of things like the quantity of Elon Musk’s tweets, the fluctuations in Bitcoin’s value and the results of video game tournaments. It’s a world, but it’s not quite the world.
A little dispirited by my loss, I kicked around the salty shallows and laid off Polymarket for a few days. During that time it sought to lure me back with frequent emails. It announced that it had natural gas futures, showed the odds of Israel taking military action in Gaza on a given day and told me “there are new reports that the president is considering a plan to seize Iran’s nuclear materials in a daring commando raid. Can he pull it off?” Then Trump threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight”. He posted in the morning of Tuesday 7 April, and set a deadline for 8pm Eastern Time that evening. Here, then, was the Rubicon. Suddenly, it seemed the whole world was at stake, embroiled in a gamble, suspended in the roll of a die.
Soon enough, a new market appeared, on my dashboard at first with $0 of volume: “Trump announces a Hormuz deadline extension today?” I liquidated my standing bets (how many times Keir Starmer would say “Mr Speaker” at PMQs) and went all in. I first bet on an extension at 45 cents, then cashed out at 64 cents and bet the other way, on the notion that I would need the money a lot more if apocalypse dawned. I went to bed as much of the world did, in a quiet and scared mood, watching for doom. In the morning, I checked the news on Polymarket. Volume was almost a million dollars, and the odds of an extension had gone to over 99 per cent. There was a ceasefire. The BBC showed Iranians crying with relief.
My portfolio had slumped to almost nothing, but I was probably richer, and certainly safer, than I would have been had world supply collapsed. And part of me felt I deserved the loss. We usually keep contempt for those who bet on serious things, as with bankers before the credit crunch. Most of the people I told about my gambling seemed uneasy about it, and my girlfriend called it “sick and twisted”.
Polymarket itself appeared to feel uneasy about the tenor of the bets. At the top of the deadline-extension market, it installed a justification banner. “Note on Middle East Markets: The promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events to society. That ability is particularly invaluable in gut-wrenching times like today. After discussing with those directly affected by the attacks, who had dozens of questions, we realized that prediction markets could give them the answers they needed in ways TV news and X could not.”
There is something uneasy about the alliance of avarice and violence at play when you place bets on a foreign war. Then again the most powerful democratic office in the world seems to be betting on the same thing. Polymarket fascinates us for the simplicity with which it treats world events as a matter of speculation, and with which it supposes that uncertainty can be redeemed by financial self-interest. It is for that simplicity that it seems not just to interest us, but somehow also to explain us.
A novel more lucid than most about post-2016 power is Giuliano da Empoli’s The Wizard of the Kremlin. At one stage in that book, a fictional Yevgeny Prigozhin waves a banknote at the narrator, and explains “a flaw in our brains, one that we all share”. If you can have the money now, or a coin flip for “double or nothing”, people decline the bet when they will gain the total, and take the bet when they will pay the total. That’s the West’s situation, Prigozhin explains. “With every passing day, their power diminishes, the situation slips further out of their control, the future is no longer theirs.” The narrator understands: “They’re ready to make crazy choices.”
The more we feel ourselves losing, the more we gamble. At this moment of history it is not quite clear yet who is losing, but it is plain who is gambling. As for my personal lot, I didn’t quite have nothing. My portfolio stood at $0.79. Chastened by my losses, I decided to make a safe bet, and took my cash to an easier market: “Nobel Peace Prize Winner 2026”.
[Further reading: Patrick Radden Keefe’s obituary for Britain]
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