A Game of Guesses
https://markets.predictwise.com/entertainment/game-of-thrones
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/us/game-of-thrones-predictions-betting.html
When the final season of Game of Thrones aired, there was a very large prediction market for various show events (ie. would Tyrion have a drink in the first episode). But one prediction market boomed the largest: who would we see sitting on the Iron Throne at the end of the series?
Unfortunately, what started off as an intense prediction battle became an unfortunate cheat. As the writers of
How Bettors in the Know Cashed In on ‘Game of Thrones’ show (link in image), there is significant evidence that some bettors used inside knowledge to bet on the right answer and steal away with a large sum of money.
As seen on predictwise.com, most of the characters’ prediction graphs follow reasonable curves. We see one character start off at around 40 cent shares at the beginning of the show and slowly drop as the show progressed(the 7nth character down on predictwise). A couple of characters have relatively large spikes near the beginning of season 8 (who’s names I will not reveal here for spoiler reasons – characters 2 and 4 on predictwise). However, the “correct victor” was at about 10 cent shares until right before the last couple episodes. Then, suddenly, they shot up to 50 cent shares without any major indicator occurring in the show. On other prediction websites, this character’s shares shot to as high as 83 cents.
The way prediction shares work is that the inverse odds are calculated by the market though a wealth share weighted average. If a lot of people bet on the same character, then the weighted average will approach 1 – meaning the inverse odds approaches 1. Since the odds represents how much one stands to gain from the bet, inverse odds of 1 means the bettor is gaining nothing at all.
So the more people that bet on one character “winning”, the more expensive that character’s shares cost. In the end, “correct” shares pay out 1 dollar each while “incorrect” shares are worthless. So we see that 83 cent shares are insanely high-risk with little reward: for each 80 cents put in the bettor only stands to gain 20 cents! Clearly, especially compounded with the fact that the actual “victor” of the show was a bit unexpected, this is not normal prediction market betting. These bettors had to be certain that their bet would pay off in order to bid the way that they did.
A Game of Thrones gained one of the largest and most popular prediction market of any predetermined/prewritten source of public intrigue. And as the events of the show and betting market have shown, there is a reason why. While Game of Thrones can be leaked by crew members on set in order to steal a little extra cash, political elections are events that cannot be known beforehand. It is very likely that we will not see a prediction market this large form around another written show for a long time – perhaps forever.