Kiss that $54 million goodbye – the house always wins.

Photo above – The sheriff (Timothy Olyphant) stops a crooked roulette game in mid spin. Picture courtesy of HBO/Deadwood. You have to see this show. Best HBO series ever.

I keep getting pop-ups on my phone from Kalshi, the “prediction market” app. They want me to bet. I don’t click them on. Even if it is possible to bet on whether it would be too cloudy to see the lunar eclipse.

Kalshi recently lost $54 million on the death of Ayatollah Khamenei. But they’re not paying. If you bet he WAS going die. out you’d have a share of the Kalshi payout. Which apparently will never happen. (See link below). The house always wins.

What is Kalshi, anyway? Who runs this thing? Tarek Monsour, a Lebanese American with degrees from some college in the country of Lebanon, and MIT. Mr. Mansour turned on the Kashi betting app 2021. He’s 20 something, and now worth $1.X billion-something according to Forbes. Tarek credits a brief internship with Goldman Sachs as his inspiration for mobile betting.

Stop laughing - here’s where it really gets even funnier. The Kalshi world headquarters is at 594 Broadway, NYC, NY 10012. Which sounds nice enough until you hear it was built in 1900, and last sold in 2008 for around $700,000. Still, a ritzy address to impress your investors/customers, no?

Tarek Monsour owes his billions to sports wagering, which comprises 90% of Kalshi’s action. Who doesn’t like to bet on the Superbowl? Well, that’s over, so Kashi dreamed up new ways to entice bettors. “Who gets killed first in the next war?” Some politicians in DC are holding press conferences to moan that bets like this are immoral. I’d like to ask them (as a card-carrying journalist) if launching a first strike itself isn’t also some sort of immoral bet? Hoping that you kill so many of “them” that they give up right away? That’s a bet Putin lost when he invaded Ukraine.

I don’t know if Kalshi was also taking bets on the kidnapping of Venezuela’s narco-adjacent dictator, Nicholas Maduro. The results of that 30 minute war would probably have made some “prediction market” owners rich, and mobile app bettors as well.

I’m against military first strikes, but I’m NOT against removing dictators who slaughter tens of thousands of protestors in the streets. I wouldn’t know how to set the odds for events like those. Evidently Tarek Mansour doesn’t either. He gave "extremely favorable odds" to bring out reluctant bettors.

Advice to Tarek Mansour: Pay off the winners. You can afford to take a paltry $54 million hit, since you’re a multi-billionaire. And besides, March Madness is coming up. You don’t want to find Kalshi locked out of all that action, do you? Pay off the Khamenei thing. Smile for the cameras. Admit you don’t know how to set odds on military events. Vow to stick to wagers on things people consider legit. Remind everyone that the First Four game is in less than 2 weeks.

The odds of creating the perfect bracket are 1 in 9 quintillion (a 9 with15 zeros after it). I’ve included a link below if anyone needs a reminder on how to sets odds. So it’s unlikely somebody is going to start betting with Texas Southern and make it all the way through to the final game. The odds of a perfect bracket are MUCH worse than getting hit by lightning.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

Kalshi is not paying bettors the $54 million made on Khamenei death

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