Discover and track sports and entertainment prediction markets.

Kalshi's championship contracts (World Series, Stanley Cup, Super Bowl, NBA Finals) auto- settle once the league announces the winner via official channels. World Series resolves at Commissioner's Trophy presentation; Stanley Cup at the Cup ceremony; NBA Finals at the Commissioner's Trophy presentation. Settlement happens within minutes of the on-court ceremony. There is no dispute window on these contracts.

Championship futures (e.g. "Dodgers win 2026 World Series") resolve over a season-long window and reprice on every game. Individual-game contracts resolve in 2-3 hours from tip-off to final whistle. Futures have deeper liquidity and slower decay; game contracts have faster resolution and tighter spreads at tip. Most traders take futures for thesis trades, game contracts for in-play.

Standard practice: the contract resolves on the official final result, which includes overtime, extra innings, and shootouts. The contract language usually says "regulation and overtime as needed." Read the resolution language carefully on contracts that ask about specific quarters, halves, or innings, those are often regulation-only and can diverge from the final result. Kalshi names the inclusion explicitly; Polymarket's language varies by market.

Award contracts typically resolve on the official announcement, not the vote. The vote happens days to weeks before the announcement (BBWAA, NBA media panel, Academy voters) and the result leaks rarely but does leak. Contract price moves on rumor before the announcement. The market rewards traders who track vote-tabulation timing precisely.

Polymarket sports settlements run via UMA proposer. After the contract's deadline, a UMA tokenholder files a proposed outcome and the network confirms within 24 hours unless disputed. Game-outcome disputes are rare (the score is the score). Most disputes are on award timing or eligibility-style markets. After a year of disputes, UMA introduced the MOOV2 whitelist in August 2025, restricting proposals on high-volume contracts to vetted proposers. Read the proposer history before trading edge-case award contracts.

Both platforms list the same major Finals binaries. Kalshi auto-settles faster and has tighter spreads at small size. Polymarket has deeper liquidity for size but a 24-hour UMA confirmation window. The arb opportunity opens during clinching games when Kalshi moves to $1.00 minutes after the trophy ceremony and Polymarket lags by hours. Traders with positions on both venues can capture the small spread by closing on Kalshi and opening on Polymarket simultaneously, but liquidity dries up fast post-clinch.

Polymarket multi-option events (World Cup winner, Eurovision winner, F1 Drivers' Champion) decompose into one binary contract per option. Each binary resolves yes or no on a single team, country, or driver. The structure lets traders express positions on individual options without taking a view on the rest. The trade-off: liquidity is spread across many binaries instead of pooled. The "leader" binary (highest Yes price) is usually the most liquid in any given event.

Closing line value (CLV) is the sportsbook concept of the difference between the price you filled at and the line at game close. Positive CLV is a proxy for skill. Prediction markets generalise this across longer windows: if you filled World Series Dodgers at 22¢ in October 2025 and the contract resolves YES at $1.00 in June 2026, your "CLV" is +78¢. Aggregate CLV across many trades is the cleanest measure of edge.

Boxing and UFC contracts resolve on the official decision recorded by the sanctioning body (TKO for UFC, the relevant boxing commission for boxing matches). Decisions are usually announced ringside within minutes of the final bell. Disputes are rare but happen, primarily on judges' decisions in close fights. Following the Polymarket-TKO partnership in 2025, UFC and Zuffa Boxing markets resolve in close alignment with TKO's official records.

Standard practice: the contract holds open until the season-long event can be answered. If a star player is suspended for the playoffs, the championship futures contract reprices but does not resolve early; it still resolves on the actual Finals winner. If a team is disqualified entirely (rare), most contracts resolve NO on the disqualified team. Read the resolution language for "fielded" or "competing" clauses.

Mechanically similar: an event, a deadline, a named source. Difference is the source type. Sports resolve on official scoreboards (clean). Entertainment resolves on votes (Survivor jury, Eurovision juries + televote, Academy voters), which can have semantic ambiguity ("eligible to win," "qualifying performance," "best original song" definitions). Entertainment contracts are the more dispute-prone half of this cluster.

F1 has 24 races over 9 months. The championship is decided by cumulative points, not a single playoff. Contract price moves with every race, sometimes by 10-20 cents in a single weekend on a dramatic result. The contract resolves at Abu Dhabi (the season finale), but the math is often locked weeks earlier. Liquidity peaks in the European leg (June-September) and the November-December closing run.