Chaos! World Cup upsets harvest whales: 400,000 yuan in reverse bets makes a furious profit of 9 million, while those who bet on the popular teams are lining up on rooftops

Today I want to tell a story. On Polymarket, a small account named fishalive registered just this June and has only placed two bets—both all-in on the Spain vs. Cape Verde match.

Spain dominated possession with 75%, took 27 shots on goal, and should have been a sure win. But the game ended 0-0, and Cape Verde’s 40-year-old goalkeeper Vozinha was named Man of the Match. This draw caused massive losses for many bettors on Polymarket, but fishalive netted nearly $9 million in a single day.

He bet on the contract "Spain cannot win," which paid out about $4.7 million; simultaneously, he bet on Cape Verde with a +2.5 goal handicap (rule: add 2.5 goals to the weaker team before comparing total scores), earning about $8.5 million. The total principal was only $400k, with a net profit close to $9 million.

Data from Polymarket’s sports section shows that the initial odds for this $400k bet were only 9%, yet the final payout was $4,702,769.23. More importantly, this position was only fully established 8 minutes before kickoff. The newly registered wallet precisely predicted the draw, and the on-chain ledger let everyone see the huge payout in real time.

At the same time, another trader, betoor619, bet on Spain to win with an implied odds of up to 92%. He invested nearly $1 million, with a potential payout of only $85k. When the draw happened, his position was wiped out. A few days earlier, a similar move occurred: another user bet $1 million on Spain to win, which only returned $400k if successful, but the bet was invalidated as well.

This isn’t the first tragedy. Trader FlickRaw lost about $4.2 million in total: $2.7 million on the Netherlands beating Japan, and $1.5 million on Belgium beating Egypt. Japan equalized twice, with the 88th-minute goal making it 2-2; Belgium was scored on by Egypt in the 19th minute, but equalized at 66 minutes, ending 1-1.

That Belgium match also wiped out the largest single bet of this World Cup so far: trader leeeroyjenkins invested $8.6 million on Belgium to win, which would have paid about $13.1 million if successful, but the game ended in a draw again.

Why do popular bets suffer large losses? In terms of strength, Spain, the Netherlands, and Belgium are clearly stronger, and the market agrees. But "win-only" contracts only pay out for a single result, and draws are very common—if the final whistle ends with a tie, even a large advantage in play results in a zero payout. The odds for betting on a favorite to win are priced as high as 92 cents, with the market defaulting to confidence in victory; if no additional goal is scored, the value drops to zero.

fishalive’s profit comes from the fact that the "Spain cannot win" contract and the lay positions both pay out under the draw condition. All bettors betting on Spain to win are essentially betting on the draw.

The championship odds fluctuate wildly with match results. Goldman Sachs’ pre-match model showed Spain had a 26% chance of winning the title, higher than France’s 19%. But after Cape Verde’s draw, Polymarket re-priced the market, and France took the lead.

Single-match contracts spread very quickly: 90-minute settlement, large profit and loss screenshots can be rapidly shared on social media, and unreasonable large bets are immediately penalized. Large traders tend to bet on favorites to win, but the high asymmetric returns always come from lay positions or contracts that incorporate draw risk—like "team cannot win" contracts that price in the possibility of a draw in advance.

The World Cup’s global audience, fans’ understanding of win/loss logic, dense group stages with new hot topics every few hours, the emotional attachment to national teams, and transparent settlement mechanisms that allow every large bet to be screenshot and shared—these features help prediction markets break out of the crypto niche.

Two major future trends: as knockout rounds approach, trading volume will continue to expand. On-chain public wallets, real-time odds changes, and national team sentiment make Polymarket a sports media focus. The profit story of Cape Verde and the loss case of Belgium are just the beginning; new large out-of-the-box trades will appear every few days.

Compared to traditional sports betting, single-match markets are faster-paced and more intuitive in profit and loss. Many traders, like those betting on Spain, invest hundreds of thousands to earn tens of thousands, and after repeated losses, they reduce their single-sided heavy bets and shift funds toward lay positions or inverse bets.

Regulators are also accelerating this trend. On June 10, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission released a draft regulation proposing a federal prediction market oversight system, recognizing the price discovery value of sports contracts. But opposition from U.S. states, indigenous tribes, and traditional gambling industries remains. A survey by the American Gaming Association found that 85% of the public considers such contracts as gambling. Spain briefly banned Polymarket and Kalshi at the end of May. Public debate has shifted from market growth to regulatory disputes: whether anonymous wallets and billion-dollar betting should be classified the same as financial derivatives.

It’s currently unclear whether fishalive’s huge profits stem from precise judgment, pure luck, or exploiting pricing loopholes in single-sided contracts—on-chain ledger alone cannot determine this. But the ledger clearly records that funds flowed from confident bettors on favorites to traders who understood the draw risk.

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