Pope Betting Odds: Bettors Lose Millions Predicting New Pope As Polymarket Edge Crash
Players Lose Millions Trying to Guess the New Pope as Polymarket Edge Crash
This development calls into question the supposed increased accuracy of betting markets like Polymarket compared to traditional polls.
Posted by Tim Craig | Edited by: Aoyon Ashraf Updated: May 9, 2025 8:02 pm Published: May 9, 2025 2:06 am
Key points:
- Polymarket players misjudged the outcome of the papal conclave: Robert Francis Prevost won, although his chances, according to the platform, were only 1%.
- The event highlights the difficulty in predicting rare events such as papal conclaves, in contrast to Polymarket's successful predictions in more frequent political elections.
In recent months, cryptocurrency prediction platform Polymarket has built a reputation for outperforming bookmakers.
However, on Thursday everyone was proven completely wrong when they made a mistake in their assessment of the results of the papal conclave.
Winner Robert Francis Prevost was not among the favourites: before the result was announced, bettors put the odds of the US-born cardinal becoming Pope Francis' successor at just 1%.
Participants on Polymarket, as on traditional betting markets, gave Cardinal Pietro Parolin the highest odds – 28%.
With more than $28 million in bets on candidates other than Prevost, the outcome was a total bust for many bettors.
This development calls into question the supposed increased accuracy of betting markets like Polymarket compared to traditional polls.
Polymarket allows users to bet on the outcome of everything from football matches to political elections. Unlike traditional betting platforms, where the casino sets the odds based on its best judgment, Polymarket odds reflect users’ bets in real time.
Simply put, the higher the demand for a particular outcome, the higher the odds and betting prices.
Polymarket made headlines in November when bettors gave Republican candidate Donald Trump significantly higher odds to win the US presidential election than most other sources.
“Polymarket prices seem to be fairly accurate in reflecting the views of smart money,” Coleman Stumpf, an economics professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, told CoinDesk at the time, noting that Polymarket players appear to have a slight edge in predicting election outcomes.
An analysis of historical data by Alex McCullough, a New York-based data analyst, found that Polymarket has previously predicted the outcome of world events a month in advance with 90% accuracy.
What went wrong?
The reason Polymarket players were so wrong about the outcome of the papal conclave is that the event is extremely difficult to predict, Domer, one of Polymarket's leading anonymous players, explained in a post on Channel X.
“It's like entering a store that has no connection to the outside world,” he said. “Even the participants themselves probably wouldn't have been able to predict it.”
Since it is difficult for punters to find an edge on such an exotic bet, many are likely to default to the opinions of traditional betting markets and media, resulting in a close match between the odds between Polymarket and other betting markets such as Betfair.
The rarity of papal conclaves may also have worsened the situation.
Pope Francis, the previous pope, was appointed
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