Washington: American bars must have wall-to-wall televisions showing football, basketball and hockey. So the idea of instead examining CNN, oil prices and the “Pentagon pizza index” seems counterintuitive.
But not in Washington. In this town, it makes perfect sense. And everyone is talking about it.
Bars is a marketing technique from the large market forecasting company Polymarket, a website where you can trade stocks in the results of real life events.
It’s a bit like sports betting, but with everything. You can use cryptocurrency to bet on whether the Iranian government will fall at the end of March (currently a 2 percent chance), who will win Eurovision 2026 (Finland is the crowd favorite) or whether the Clavicular will be lifted by Gorlock the Destroyer during Mog’s World Order..
If you don’t understand that last one, you’re not online enough – but you’re certainly not alone.
Polymarket is currently banned and restricted in Australia as it does not have a local license. Indeed, it returned to the United States only recently, after receiving federal regulatory approval three years after it was banned. But the Australians can easily access it using a virtual private network.
Prediction markets are fast becoming big business. Kalshi, the largest US prediction market and Polymarket’s main rival, doubled its value in the three months to March, and is now worth an estimated US$22 billion ($31 billion).
However, at the Polymarket bar, things will not go to plan. It’s opening night, and dozens of journalists, social media influencers and other “VIPs” are packed inside. The free drinks are flowing, but the TV screens – which are supposed to show Bloomberg’s financial channels and live odds of various events – are not working.
Before the 9 o’clock opening night, the organizers forbade it. The bouncer tells the line of people waiting to get in that the bar will close early due to “technical difficulties”.
Jack Verrill, a 21-year-old college student in a suit, is one of the disappointed non-VIPs who missed out. “I have a feeling they’re good at making prediction markets, but bad at making bars,” Verrill says.
The bar is called The Situation Room, named after the White House bedroom where presidents and their advisers monitor, and influence, situations around the world.
The term “status monitoring” has become an Internet meme about paying attention to world events – sometimes excessively. After all, there is a lot to stay on top of these days: missile strikes, oil prices, stock markets, prediction markets, Donald Trump’s posts, responses to Trump’s posts – it goes on.
According to Atlanticthe phrase can be traced back to a post on X, formerly Twitter, from early 2025. A user posted a photo of a muscular Jeff Bezos, wearing a polo shirt and watching his Blue Origin space launch. “Male desire to follow the situation,” the user added as a caption.
Like most internet lingo, it’s become a running joke – but it’s also a bad one. With the information overload of the internet age comes the opportunity to gain an edge and make money. Prediction markets, indeed, can be very profitable for people who know what is about to happen. The possibility of corruption is also high.
The first night may have been turbulent, but by the next afternoon, the energy issue has been resolved, and the Status Room is full of young people drinking drinks and watching big screens.
There’s still basketball, but you’ll also see charts showing the “geo-threat tracker”, the current price of bitcoin, gold and crude oil, or the prediction market for the 2026 midterm elections. Several screens also show CNN.
The machine allows you to estimate the probability of various events – “Will Nvidia stock reach $200 per share in 2026”, or “Will Call of Duty break sales records for the first week?” – and compare it to the market. In the prediction markets, the odds are set by users who buy and sell shares in the probability of the event, not by a middleman.
Basically, if you pay US60¢ to participate in an event, and if it happens, the market will reach $US1. You get a profit of US40¢ per share. If it doesn’t, the market will settle at $0, and you’ll lose US60¢.
The bar also displays the Pentagon’s famous pizza tracker – generally dismissed as a myth, but fun to indulge in. The idea is that while shipping goods from pizza places near the Pentagon, something big is happening at the US defense center.
Sam Bilotta and his friend John Jennings are dressed in full suits and ties as they check out the room. “We saw this on Twitter,” says Bilotta, 25. “I’m a news person and I thought this would be a great bar.”
Jennings, 22, adds: “We’re definitely on Twitter a lot. We’re online. We like to keep up with that.”
They are not kidding about being news hooligans. It turns out that Bilotta also follows Australian politics; he listens to ABC Politics Now podcast, and knows hosts Patricia Karvelas and Fran Kelly.
Later, this title sought out Daf Orlovsky, the creative director of the project, who explains why the monitoring of the situation is so interesting, especially for young men.
“It’s too old to look at legacy media and try to follow the news,” he says. “People who watch cable television are probably an older generation. It’s not the best way to understand what’s going on in the world.”
Of course, the news as reported by the legacy media still greatly affects the probability of prediction markets like Polymarket or Kalshi.
I ask Orlovsky if he considers Polymarket a gamble. “I don’t consider it gambling – it’s nothing,” he says. “I see it as a stock business based on the outcome of events.”
At that stage, the thinker takes up the issue and the direction of the questions. “We’re here to talk about The Situation Room, not the industry,” he interjects.
Many American politicians are not happy to see these companies return to legal practice. last week, Major League Baseball announced Polymarket will become his official prediction market partner – a move condemned as “deplorable” by Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“I know if I’m a politician these companies will spend a billion dollars against me for saying that, but mass gambling is not good for society,” he posted on X. “It turns life into a casino, it traps people in addiction and debt, it incites domestic violence and incites fraud.”
The Center for American Progress, a progressive institution, is also critical – especially of the anonymity offered by using cryptocurrency. It shows that in the hours before the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro was captured and American forces in January, a anonymous user bet of Polymarket that Maduro will be out of office soon. PBS reported the user pocketed $US400,000.
Donald Trump Jr is an investor in Polymarket through his venture capital firm, and an advisor to Polymarket and Kalshi. The administration has been friendly to the industry, and Michael Selig, the Trump-appointed head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, recently spoke out against attempts by several US states to ban prediction markets.
“The CFTC will no longer sit idly by while overzealous state governments undermine the agency’s exclusive authority over these markets by seeking to impose national bans on these exciting products,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal.
Back in the Situation Room, Bilotta, who works for a non-profit organization, and Jennings, an IT consultant in politics, both say they are not gamblers. Bilotta says he uses prediction markets for data analysis, noting their track record of predicting interest rate hikes.
“I’ve never gambled on any of this stuff,” Jennings says. “I just use it, like, to watch what’s going on, to monitor the situation, to find out. But I, personally, have never gambled.”
Get direct mail from our visitors journalists on what is making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.
Michael Koziol is the North American correspondent for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, deputy editor of the Sun-Herald and federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect through X or email address.
