The Secret World of Gamblers Betting Millions on the 2016 Election

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Daily Beast:

“This is, by far, the most interesting work I’ve done in years,” says John Aristotle Phillips, who once had the FBI come and take his blueprints for a nuclear bomb.

 

Phillips is now the CEO of PredictIt, a website where people are doing a pretty tremendous job of shielding themselves from the realities of this apocalyptic election by betting on it. When the world ends, some of them will die with a few thousand more American dollars literally burning holes in their pockets.

 

Some of the most dedicated of those PredictIt traders are all in this bar, The Grayson, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan on Super Tuesday, many of them trying not to spill their free Coors or Bud Lights on their MacBook Pros as results pour in.

 

They are traders, by the way, and not degenerate gamblers. At least not by definition. PredictIt is a prediction market with a hard cap, and not one of those DraftKings-style sites where robots steal money from poor people who watch a lot of SportsCenter. It’s technically operated out of Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, but who are they kidding: Their offices are in Washington, D.C.

 

PredictIt’s PR people probably do not want us to write that these people are here to make a bunch of cash on the outcome of this election, but these people are here to make a bunch of cash on the outcome of this election.

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Place yer bets...