The game changing sports prediction play, enabled through
@Polymarket, powered by
@0xPolygon
Today is the League of Legends
#Worlds2025 Finals between T1 and KT, a historic esports archrivals dating back to the early starcraft days.
I've been watching
@lolesports for more than 10 years, doing predictions with my friends through official Pick'ems. I personally think I have some edge given my vast experience of watching the game.
Then
@Polymarket came.
Obviously I won many predictions this worlds (KT vs GEN being the biggest win).
However, there is one aspect of Polymarket sports prediction that is completely game changing and different from the traditional sports betting:
Real-time markets with liquidity.
Not only can you predict who's going to win at the end, but you can always trade your predictions along the game, based on how the game is proceeding.
This is not possible in traditional sports betting, because there is no market for people to buy and sell their predictions mid-way. You can middle, but that's inefficient.
In Polymarket, the outcomes are tokenized by Gnosisโ Conditional Token Framework (CTF) on Polygon Network. They are distinct ERC 1155 tokens related to a parent condition and backed by the same collateral.
Also, due to a real-time market, people can buy and sell their binary positions anytime while there is liquidity, creating opportunities that did not exist before.
In this specific T1 vs KT case,
you can see that the outcome is favored heavily towards
#T1WIN (64ยข), however, people expect closer match between T1 and KT on a game level (57ยข). Also, people highly expect that the game will go further than game 4 (79ยข), suggesting a close match between the two.
What does this mean?
It means that KT is underpriced given people's predictions on various aspect of the game. If this was traditional betting, you would buy for KT, but will still risk losing the entire bet. (Although, there are cases for early settlement or cash-outs at a very bad condition to the bookmaker)
Polymarket is unique that you can sell your positions mid-way not to a book maker, but to another buyer. In my case, I bought shares of KT because I predict that the match will be very tight between the two teams, potentially going to game 5. (I might be wrong)
What I can do is buy KT shares at a discount, sell it when the game becomes 50:50 (which I predict), then potentially buy T1, if I feel like they'll win the match eventually like the majority of the people.
Conditional tokens with liquid real-time market has paved way for this to be possible efficiently, which creates a huge arbitrage or opportunistic prediction volumes to enter in.
I believe Polymarket can completely replace the traditional sports betting at this rate, leading to mass adoption at scale for the
@0xPolygon based conditional token contracts even without them noticing.
Now, between BDD and Faker, who's shares will you buy for today's Finals going into the match?
@DelioPaul @yellowpantherx needs to answer ๐