The Bulletin Board
THE LEDE: Survivor boss goes in on prediction markets for spoiling Season 50.
BEYOND the HEADLINE: House Oversight Committee announces prediction market investigation.
AROUND the WATERCOOLER: Trump talks prediction markets… again.
STRAY THOUGHTS: It’s WSOP time!
SPONSOR’S MESSAGE - Underdog: the most innovative company in sports gaming.
At Underdog we use our own tech stack to create the industry’s most popular games, designing products specifically for the American sports fan.
Join us as we build the future of sports gaming.
Visit: https://underdogfantasy.com/careers
The Lede: Are Survivor Spoilers Insider Trading?
Prediction markets cannot stay out of the news, and as is often the case, they’re not making headlines for their societal benefits, rather it’s for their slipups. The latest being markets on who will win the pre-taped season of Survivor.
In an interview with Variety, Jeff Probst, the longtime host, producer and director of the hit show said prediction markets are “incentivizing people to lie, cheat and steal to get ahead.”
“Clearly, if 90% of the people are voting for somebody, there’s a leak. But to look at us, the producers, as though we have a problem, is the mirror pointing in the wrong direction,” he says. “[Prediction market platforms] are the ones with the problem, not us. We went and made our show in a vacuum, and we keep it very tightly contained, but if you are foolish and naive enough to not think that somebody might leak it, that’s your problem.”
Variety noted that Aubry Bracco had “above an 80% chance of winning before the season even premiered” on Kalshi and Polymarket.
As I’ve highlighted in the newsletter, the stench of insider trading is pervasive: the Pope, the Nobel Prize, a Google insider, Coinbase CEO, Israeli airstrikes, Nicolás Maduro, and Chris Hayes, to name a few.
But as Jeff Edelstein noted in January, prediction markets are offering markets that lend themselves to insider trading from what someone might say to when a new product will be released. As Edelstein put it, “Don’t ever — as in ever — buy contracts on anything where the outcome is potentially already known by someone else.”
I was a bit more blunt, “Stop offering these goofy markets in the first place.”
Or in the words of Dustin Gouker, “The industry is literally called ‘prediction markets.’ If you stick with letting people try to predict things that haven’t already happened: Problem solved! It’s not rocket science.”
Or as I said when Kalshi announced it had uncovered two cases of insider trading back in February: kudos to Kalshi, but where there is smoke there is fire:
“There is a lot more smoke emanating from other markets, not to mention the markets with built-in information asymmetries, where results are known to a select group (which I’ve detailed in the past), and which Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour tried to differentiate from insider trading in a post-Super Bowl interview on CNBC.”
In the same newsletter I noted Axios’ reporting on Survivor 50, filmed in June 2025, as the latest example of an after-the-fact market, ripe for manipulation:
“The landmark 50th season of the CBS reality show “Survivor” is set to premiere on Wednesday, but Polymarket and Kalshi traders have already coalesced around a single contestant as the probable winner among the 24 all-star returnees… If an outcome has already been decided, betting on it starts to look less like prediction and more like knowledge arbitrage — raising questions about whether these markets can prevent insiders from cashing in on nonpublic information.”
As I said in December:
“This type of trading is not finding the wisdom of crowds, it’s creating a piggy bank for informed elites, who can exploit everyone else… If markets need secret knowledge to work, they’re not aggregating truth; they’re laundering asymmetries.”
Unwanted Attention
Circling back to Survivor, the show’s popularity, and prediction markets “spoiling” the season for some viewers, could be a significant problem, particularly when it is justified by a not-so-small cohort who believes insider trading is somewhere between fine and complicated.
As former Kalshi employee and now prediction market investor Adhi Rajaprabhakaran wrote after insider trading allegations on the capture of Nicholas Maduro [bold mine]:
“Prediction markets aren’t stocks, and the legal framework governing them is different. The economic purpose is different too. And the technological reality of blockchain-linked liquidity pools makes enforcement of insider trading prohibitions, as traditionally understood, somewhere between difficult and impossible.
“This isn’t a defense of the Maduro trade. I’m trying to think clearly about what “insider trading” even means in prediction markets, why the concept doesn’t translate cleanly from equities, and why society is going to have to grapple with a new reality: prediction markets will attract informed money, and that might be fine.”
And Kalshi seems unfazed by all of this, with its head of enforcement noting that spoilers weren’t invented by prediction markets, and people are just using “public rumors”:
“This week there was a New York Times article titled “People Are Making Money Betting on Pre-taped ‘Survivor’ Episodes” that suggested insider trading is happening with our Survivor markets. We’ve investigated and, so far, have not found definitive evidence of that. We’ve been checking backgrounds of traders in this market and have not identified anyone with any connection to Survivor. After reviewing the trading activity, it appears the likeliest explanation is that traders are following public rumors, following other traders who placed trades in the opening hours of the market, or just trading based on research and conviction.
”Same scenario for The Bachelorette, and same conclusion thus far. It seems that Reality Steve’s site posts spoilers that tend to be right. People can look at those predictions, then place trades on prediction markets. That’s not insider trading.”
But here is the thing, if it’s easily manipulable, why offer this market in the first place? And the biggest head-scratcher is that this is a nothing market (about $32 million in volume on Kalshi, which is now doing billions in volume per week). It’s about the same size as a single NBA playoff game. A lot of this bad press would go away if Kalshi et al. simply stopped offering these markets.
But this wanton disregard is precisely what happens when you believe you are invincible and put the pedal to the metal — made all the more concerning by the fact that the fox is the first line of defense at the henhouse. As Probst told Variety, “They have figured out a way to capitalize on [the show]… It doesn’t sit well with me as a human. I get it — they built a great business. They don’t care.”
Beyond the Headline: House Committee Investigating Insider Trading
At the same time that prediction markets are dealing with bad press from Survivor, Congress continues to poke around the edges, with House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chair James Comer announcing investigations into insider trading on Kalshi and Polymarket on CNBC’s Squawk Box.
In a press release, Comer said the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has sent “letters to Polymarket Chief Executive Officer Shayne Coplan and Kalshi Chief Executive Officer Tarek Mansour, Chairman Comer requests documents and information from Polymarket and Kalshi to assess how the platforms verify the identities of domestic and foreign account holders, enforce geographic restrictions, and monitor suspicious trading activity to guard against insider trading.”
The press release lists several instances of insider trading, and now Comer can add Survivor to the list:
“According to a recent New York Times investigation, more than 80 Polymarket users placed suspiciously timed bets, including wagers made hours before undisclosed U.S. and Israeli military operations against Iran, raising concerns that safeguards across prediction market platforms may be inadequate. In May 2025, gubernatorial candidate Kyle Langford placed a $200 wager on his own race through Kalshi, while three other politicians also reportedly bet on contests involving their own campaigns. Additionally, a federal indictment unsealed on April 24, 2026, alleges that U.S. Army Master Sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke used classified information about Operation Absolute Resolve—the operation that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—to place wagers that generated more than $409,000 in profits.”
Around the Watercooler
Social media conversations, rumors, and gossip.
If you were wondering where Donald Trump stood on prediction markets, we seem to have an answer (full story from NBC News):
Recall that Trump said he’s not a fan of the casinofication of the US, and called out prediction markets for contributing to that back in April. But as I noted at the time, President Donald Trump walked those comments back a bit in the days that followed. Per Sander Lutz of Decrypt: “Trump seemed to change his tune a bit from Thursday, saying he ‘knows some people who are very smart, and they like it.’ Trump’s son, Don Jr, is an advisor to top two prediction markets, Polymarket and Kalshi. Trump also told me other countries are legalizing the sector, and America will fall behind if it doesn’t follow.”
And as I said would happen: “I expect this flip-flopping to continue as the hotly contested mid-terms approach, and prediction markets increasingly become a political third-rail.”
With Trump’s full-throated endorsement, it’s hard to see this not becoming a hit topic on the campaign trail. I’ve reposted this several times, but it’s becoming truer by the day:
“As I said in March: I’ve been warning for a while that prediction markets are likely to surface in the midterms (and the 2028 presidential election cycle) as a flashpoint for larger systemic issues: Corruption, pay-for-play, laissez-faire regulation, and out-of-control tech bros.”
But also note who wasn’t included in the “SCUM” category; as Daniel Wallach has noted, the CFTC is only suing states with Democrat governors and attorneys general.
Stray Thoughts
The 2026 World Series of Poker kicked off yesterday, and while I won’t be covering the individual events in any capacity, I will keep my eyes peeled for interesting stories and attendance trends.
You can find the full event schedule on the official WSOP site. There is also a free live stream available on YouTube.
You can also find coverage on ESPN (who hired industry stalwart Lance Bradley to cover the series), PokerNews, and Poker.org.
I also recommend my recent podcast with Lance Bradley, where we talked about, “GG Poker’s second full year running the series, the return to ESPN with Omaha Productions, the delayed final-table format, the critical importance of player storytelling, and Lance’s 50/50 prediction that the Main Event will crack 10,000 entries again.”
Episode 82: Poker's Trials and Tribulations with Lance Bradley
“It was like giving your luxury car to the neighbor’s kid and hoping that he treats it as well as you did — and that’s just not what happened.” ~ Lance Bradley, on the decline of PokerStars after the Amaya acquisition
Lance will also be writing about the WSOP on his Substack, The Overlay:
