A Polymarket trader who put about $146,700 on the Philadelphia Eagles was eight seconds from a $623,449 payout on Sunday. Then the Jacksonville Jaguars returned a kickoff 53 yards, and Cam Little made a 57-yard field goal as time expired to win 19-17 in London.
Key Takeaways
- A Polymarket account spent about $146,700 on 623,449 Eagles shares at 23 cents, two hours before kickoff.
- Eagles shares hit 99 cents after Jake Elliott’s field goal put Philadelphia ahead with eight seconds left.
A 23-Cent Bet That Hit 99 Cents, Then Zero
An account trading as Kch-Temp bought 623,449 Philadelphia Eagles shares at 23 cents on Polymarket’s international exchange at 11:26 UTC on Sunday, Oct. 11, about two hours before the team played the Jaguars at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London. It spent about $146,700, including roughly $3,300 in fees. The shares were binary contracts that pay $1 if the outcome happens and nothing if it does not, so a Philadelphia win would have returned $623,449.
Polymarket’s moneyline market on the game, where about 4.5 million shares traded, had the 2-2 Eagles as underdogs against the 3-1 Jaguars, at about 23.5 cents at kickoff. With 12 seconds left and Philadelphia trailing 16-14, Jake Elliott made a 48-yard field goal to put the Eagles ahead 17-16 with eight seconds remaining. Eagles shares jumped from about 78 cents to 99 cents within seconds and traded at 97 cents or more for about 100 seconds, valuing the account’s position at more than $600,000.
Elliott’s kickoff reached the Jacksonville 8, where Ameer Abdullah returned it 53 yards to the Philadelphia 39 with one second left. Eagles shares had slid to around 40 cents by the time Little lined up, and when his 57-yard kick went through as time expired, they fell to 1 cent and below within seconds. The account never sold: Polymarket’s activity data shows only its two purchases, filled in the same second, and the position is now worth nothing.
Remarkably, the loss was not even the account’s worst. Sunday wasn’t even a losing day for it: its six other NFL bets on Sunday’s games made about $348,000 in profit, $114,529 of it on the Minnesota Vikings beating the New Orleans Saints. About half an hour after Little’s kick, it put about $51,200 on more than 43.5 points in that night’s game between the Baltimore Ravens and Atlanta Falcons, and made $47,741.
The account’s biggest losing bet, $389,789, was against England beating Mexico at the World Cup on July 5, and its biggest win, $367,614, came from betting on fewer than 2.5 goals in Belgium’s World Cup match with Iran on June 21. Nor was Sunday a losing day for the account. Created in June, Kch-Temp had traded more than 380 markets as of Monday, when its Polymarket profile showed it up about $2.9 million.
On Kalshi, the Jaguars contract fell to 1 cent seconds after Elliott’s kick, and nearly 6 million Jaguars contracts changed hands at 1 or 2 cents over the next two minutes, about $87,000 at those prices. Kalshi’s public trade data does not show who still held them when the market settled at $1.
Prediction market volume has surged since football returned. Across the major exchanges, sports and combo contracts reached $68.2 billion in notional volume in the 30 days to Sept. 29, up about 72% from the previous 30 days, though Polymarket’s international exchange, where this bet was placed, lost volume over the same period.