Meet the gamblers betting on war, markets and more
Washington: American bars are virtually required to have wall-to-wall televisions showing football, basketball and hockey. So the idea of scanning CNN, oil prices, and the “Pentagon pizza index” instead seems counterintuitive.
But not in Washington. This makes perfect sense in this city. And everyone is talking about it.
The bar is a marketing tactic of prediction market giant Polymarket, a site where you can trade shares on the outcomes of real-life events.
It’s a bit like sports betting, but for everything. You can use cryptocurrency to bet on whether the Iranian regime will fall by the end of March (currently a 2 percent chance), who will win Eurovision 2026 (Finland is one of the favorites), or whether Clavicular will be framed by Gorlock the Destroyer during the Mog World Order..
If you don’t understand the last one, you’re not online enough; But you are definitely not alone.
Polymarket is currently banned and geo-blocked in Australia as it does not have a local licence. In fact, it only recently returned to the United States, gaining federal regulatory approval three years after it was banned. But Australians can easily access using a virtual private network.
Prediction markets are fast becoming big business. Kalshi, the largest U.S. prediction marketplace and Polymarket’s main rival, more than doubled in value in the three months through March and is now worth an estimated US$22 billion ($31 billion).
But things won’t go as planned at Polymarket’s bar. It’s opening night and dozens of journalists, social media influencers and other “VIPs” are crowded inside. Free drinks are flowing, but the TV screens that are supposed to show Bloomberg financial terminals and live odds on various events are not working.
Just before 9pm on opening night, organizers announced the event was over. A bouncer tells people waiting to get in that the bar will close early due to “technical difficulties”.
Jack Verrill, a 21-year-old college sophomore wearing a suit, is one of the disappointed non-VIPs who passed up the opportunity. “I feel like they’re good at creating prediction markets but bad at creating bars,” Verrill says.
The bar is called the Situation Room, named after the White House bunker where presidents and their advisors monitor and influence the situation around the world.
The term “monitoring the situation” has become an internet meme about paying sometimes excessive attention to world events. After all, there’s a lot to keep on top of the agenda these days: missile attacks, oil prices, stock markets, prediction markets, Donald Trump posts, responses to Trump posts – it goes on and on.
Accordingly Atlanticthis statement can be traced back to a post on X (formerly Twitter) from early 2025. One user posted a photo of a muscular, polo-clad Jeff Bezos wearing headphones and watching Blue Origin launch into space. “Masculine urge to monitor the situation,” the user added as the caption.
Like most online language, it’s become a running joke – but it’s also serious. With the information overload of the internet age comes the opportunity to gain an edge and make money. Prediction markets can obviously be lucrative for people who know what will happen. The potential for corruption is also huge.
The first night may have been a complete bust, but by the next afternoon the power problem was resolved and the Situation Room was full of eager teenagers sipping drinks and staring at overhead screens.
There’s still some basketball, but you’ll also see charts showing the “geopolitical threat monitor,” the current price of bitcoin, gold, and crude oil, or a prediction market for the 2026 midterm elections. A few screens also show CNN.
The machines allow you to rate the probabilities of various events – “Will Nvidia shares reach $200 per share in 2026” or “What will happen next time?” Call of Duty “Are you going to break sales records in the first week?” – and compare them to the market. In prediction markets, rates are set not by a central rate setter, but by users who buy and sell shares based on the probability of the event occurring.
Basically, if you pay 60¢ to get a share of an event that happens and it happens, the market settles at $1. You make a profit of 40¢ per share. If this doesn’t happen, the market settles at $0 and you lose $60.
The bar also features the famous Pentagon pizza follower; It’s often considered a myth, but it’s still fun to indulge. The idea is this; Something big is happening at the US defense headquarters when deliveries from pizza places near the Pentagon spike.
Sam Bilotta and his friend John Jennings wear full suits and ties as they check out the room. “We saw this on Twitter,” says Bilotta, 25. “I’m a news junkie and I thought this would be a really cool bar.”
Jennings, 22, adds: “We definitely spend a lot of time on Twitter. We’re online. We like to monitor the situation.”
They don’t make fun of being news junkies. It turns out Bilotta also follows Australian politics; listening to ABC Now Politics He uses the podcast and knows the hosts Patricia Karvelas and Fran Kelly.
This imprint later tracked down the project’s creative director, Daf Orlovsky, who explained why watching the situation was so appealing, especially for young men.
“Watching conventional media and trying to follow the news is very outdated,” he says. “The people who watch cable television are probably a much older generation. That’s not the best way to really understand what’s going on in the world.”
Of course, news reported by traditional media still greatly affects the odds on prediction markets like Polymarket or Kalshi.
I ask Orlovsky if he thinks Polymarket is gambling. “I don’t see it as gambling, in any way,” he says. “I am considering buying and selling shares depending on the outcome of events.”
At this point, a mentor takes issue with the direction of the questions. “We’re here to talk about the Situation Room, not the industry,” he interjects.
Many US politicians are unhappy with these companies returning to legal operations. Last week, Major League Baseball announces Polymarket It will become the official prediction market partner, a move condemned as “regrettable” by Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“As a politician, I know these companies will spend billions of dollars against me for saying this, but rampant gambling is not good for society,” he said. “It turns life into a casino, trapping people in addiction and debt, increasing domestic violence and encouraging manipulation.”
The Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, is also highly critical of the anonymity provided especially by using cryptocurrency. The report notes that in the hours before Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro was captured by US forces in January, an anonymous Polymarket user bet that Maduro would soon be removed from office. PBS reported that the user pocketed $400,000.
Donald Trump Jr. is an investor in Polymarket through his venture capital firm and an advisor to both Polymarket and Kalshi. The administration has been friendly to the industry, and Trump-appointed Commodity Futures Trading Commission chairman Michael Selig has recently opposed attempts by several U.S. states to ban prediction markets.
“The CFTC will no longer sit idly by while overzealous state governments undermine the agency’s exclusive jurisdiction over these markets by attempting to impose statewide bans on these exciting products,” he wrote. Wall StreetJournal.
At The Situation Room, Bilotta, who works for a nonprofit, and Jennings, an IT consultant in politics, say they are not gamblers. Bilotta says he uses prediction markets for data analytics, noting their track record in predicting interest rate increases.
“I didn’t actually gamble on any of this,” Jennings says. “I just use it to watch what’s going on, monitor the situation, stay informed. But I’ve never gambled personally.”
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Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political correspondent in Canberra.Connect with: X or email.
