A Polymarket bettor who uses the name “Domer” says he made a long‑shot wager on Robert Francis Prevost to become the next pope — a bet that paid off when Prevost was elected and took the name Pope Leo XIV.
Domer told CBS News that he spends a lot of time reading Twitter, news articles and other sources to find mispriced opportunities in prediction markets. “I think it’s actually fairly easy to make money on prediction markets if you’re a smart person,” he said, arguing that conventional wisdom is powerful, pervasive and often wrong in predictable ways. He looks for repeatable events and patterns he can exploit, but acknowledges some events, like a papal conclave, are rarer and harder to model.
On the conclave, Domer said he placed many long‑shot bets. He explained his approach: there’s a finite pool of cardinals, many of whom give interviews or reveal positions that make them easy to eliminate from consideration. By process of elimination and watching who talks and how, he narrowed the field and circulated bets on names that others overlooked.
“Nobody was putting money down that there would be an American Pope, but you were,” a reporter noted. Domer said Prevost’s odds were about 250‑to‑1 — a “super, super, super long shot.” He wouldn’t recall the exact stake, but he confirmed how much he won: “I made $100,000 that he would be the pope.”
The interview highlights how some bettors use detailed, often informal research and pattern recognition to identify outsized returns in prediction markets, where rare outcomes can carry steep prices until new information or a sudden event shifts expectations.
