The beauty of watching sports is that anything can happen, and it unfolds before your very eyes. In theory—and usually in reality too—sports outcomes are an ideal substrate for bets in the sense that they aren’t in any way democratic, or corrupted by preference, or based on what a producer thinks will make a good story, and they’re certainly not pre-recorded. This all tends not to be true of narrative TV, but lately that doesn’t stop some of the world’s most ill-advised bettors. If you’re the world’s biggest mark, and you want to bet your hard-earned money on, say, who dies on the White Lotus, the absurdity of approaching an actual human bookie and saying those words is gone. A prediction market will be more than happy to take your bet, and the entire world can get in on the action. Sure, the rules of the prediction market platforms say the many, many, people who know the outcome you’re putting money on aren’t supposed to take your bet, but, come on… But even if we stipulate that TV bets are harmless, they come with a nasty externality: spoiler leaks.
For instance, if you’re planning to watch the finale of Top Chef: Carolinas on June 8, I can’t recommend clicking this link to the reality TV section of Polymarket. The community has assigned a 97% probability to a certain contestant’s victory, and that level of unanimity strongly suggests that someone knows something.
