Pope Betting Odds: Bettors Lose Millions Predicting the New Pope as Polymarket Edge Fizzles Out
Pope Betting Odds: Bettors Lose Millions Predicting the New Pope as Polymarket Edge Fizzles Out
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Pope Betting Odds: Bettors Lose Millions Predicting the New Pope as Polymarket Edge Fizzles Out
The event throws into question the perceived heightened accuracy of betting markets like Poymarket over conventional polls.
The article doesn't really state what your short summary states.
Choosing a new pope isn't an open process, so there's very little information to go off of. Something like an election has a lot of public information, so those betting odds are more likely to represent the actual odds in the election.
I really don't think there's much to learn here, other than that choosing a new pope is chaotic and the process isn't very open.
He's completely missing that betting on something like the pope isn't like a random or skill based outcome. The cardinals could literally choose to pick based on the betting markets or even to profit from them if they really wanted to. Polymarket is smooth brain degeneracy for many, many reasons, but this is smooth brain degeneracy turned up to 11.
In situations like this it may make sense to just bet on all the underdogs. The market is highly overconfident in its information, you think the market’s information is crap, so you just bet against the market by taking the underdogs.
I just think it's foolhardy to bet at all. There's not enough information to make an informed decision, and even if you think you'll have better average odds by betting on the underdogs, this is a very rare event so you don't have the time to make it back up in averages.