I went to a Polymarket bar to ‘monitor the situation’. Here’s what I saw

Washington: It’s effectively mandatory for American bars to have wall-to-wall televisions showing football, basketball and hockey. So the idea of instead screening CNN, the price of oil and the “Pentagon pizza index” seems counterintuitive.

But not in Washington. In this city, it makes perfect sense. And everyone is talking about it.

The bar is a marketing ploy from prediction market giant Polymarket, a site where you can trade shares in the outcomes of real-life events.

It’s a bit like sports betting, but for everything. You can use cryptocurrency to bet on whether the Iranian regime will fall by the end of March (currently a 2 per cent chance), who will win Eurovision 2026 (Finland is a runaway favourite) or whether Clavicular will get frame-mogged by Gorlock the Destroyer during Mog 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 geoblocked in Australia as it doesn’t have a local licence. Indeed, it only recently returned to the US, having received federal regulatory approval three years after it was prohibited. But 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 $US22 billion ($31 billion).

However, at Polymarket’s bar, things are not going to plan. It’s opening night, and dozens of journalists, social media influencers and other “VIPs” are crowded inside. The free drinks are flowing, but the TV screens – which are supposed to be showing Bloomberg finance terminals and live odds of various events – are not working.

Just before 9pm on opening night, the organisers call it quits. A bouncer tells a line of people waiting to get in that the bar will be closing early due to “technical difficulties”.

Jack Verrill, a 21-year-old university sophomore wearing a suit, is one of the disappointed non-VIPs who have missed out. “I have a feeling that they’re good at making a prediction market, but they’re bad at making a bar,” Verrill says.

The bar is called The Situation Room, named for the White House bunker where presidents and their advisers monitor, and impact, the situation around the world.

The term “monitoring the situation” has become an internet meme about paying attention to world events – sometimes excessively. After all, there’s a lot to stay on top of these days: missile strikes, oil prices, sharemarkets, prediction markets, Donald Trump posts, responses to Trump posts – it goes on.

According to The Atlantic, the phrase can be tracked to a post on X, formerly Twitter, from early 2025. A user posted a picture of a muscular, polo-clad Jeff Bezos wearing a headset and watching his Blue Origin space launch. “The masculine urge to monitor the situation,” the user added as the caption.

Like most online lingo, it has become a running joke – but it’s also serious. With the information overload of the internet age comes the opportunity to gain an edge and make money. Prediction markets, obviously, can be lucrative for people who know what’s about to happen. The potential for corruption is also huge.

Night one might have been a bust, but by the following afternoon, the power issue has been resolved, and The Situation Room is full of eager young things sipping drinks and staring at overhead screens.

There’s still some basketball, but you’ll also see charts showing the “geopolitical threat monitor”, the current price of bitcoin, gold and crude oil, or a prediction market for the 2026 midterm elections. Several screens are also showing CNN.

Machines allow you to rate the odds of various events – “Will Nvidia stock hit $US200 per share in 2026”, or “Will the next Call of Duty break first-week sales records?” – and compare them to the market. In prediction markets, odds are set by users buying and selling shares in the likelihood of the event, not by a centralised oddsmaker.

Essentially, if you pay US60¢ for a share in an event happening, and it happens, the market settles at $US1. You make US40¢ profit per share. If it doesn’t happen, the market settles at $0, and you lose US60¢.

The bar also shows the well-known Pentagon pizza tracker – generally dismissed as a myth, but fun to indulge nonetheless. The idea is that when deliveries from pizza places near the Pentagon spike, something major is happening at the US defence hub.

Sam Bilotta and his friend John Jennings are wearing full suits and ties as they check out the room. “We saw this on Twitter,” says Bilotta, 25. “I’m a news junkie and I thought this would be a really cool bar.”

Jennings, 22, adds: “We’re definitely on Twitter a lot. We’re online. We love to monitor the situation.”

They’re not kidding about being news junkies. It turns out Bilotta also follows Australian politics; he listens to the ABC’s Politics Now podcast, and knows hosts Patricia Karvelas and Fran Kelly.

Later, this masthead tracked down Daf Orlovsky, the project’s creative director, who explains why monitoring the situation is so appealing, especially to younger men.

“It’s very antiquated watching heritage media and trying to follow the news,” he says. “People who watch cable television are probably a much older generation. It’s not the optimal way to actually understand what’s going on in the world.”

Of course, the news as reported by the heritage media still greatly impacts the odds on prediction markets such as Polymarket or Kalshi.

I ask Orlovsky whether he considers Polymarket to be gambling. “I don’t consider it gambling – not whatsoever,” he says. “I consider it trading shares based on the outcome of events.”

At that point, a minder takes issue with the direction of the questions. “We’re here to talk about The Situation Room, not the industry,” he interjects.

Many US politicians are not pleased to see these companies return to legal operation. Last week, Major League Baseball announced Polymarket would be its official prediction market partner – a move condemned as “sad” by Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“I know as a politician these companies are going to spend a billion dollars against me for saying it, but pervasive gambling is not good for society,” she posted on X. “It turns life into a casino, traps people in addiction and debt, surges domestic violence and fosters manipulation.”

The Centre for American Progress, a progressive think tank, is also highly critical – especially of the anonymity granted by using cryptocurrency. It points out that in the hours before Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro was captured by US forces in January, an anonymous Polymarket user bet that Maduro would soon be out of office. PBS reported the user pocketed $US400,000.

Donald Trump Jr is an investor in Polymarket through his venture capital firm, and an adviser to both Polymarket and Kalshi. The administration has been friendly towards 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 jurisdiction over these markets by seeking to establish statewide prohibitions on these exciting products,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

Back at The Situation Room, Bilotta, who works for a non-profit, and Jennings, an IT consultant in politics, both say they are not gamblers. Bilotta says he uses prediction markets for data analytics, noting their track record at predicting interest rate rises.

“I have never actually gambled on any of this stuff,” Jennings says. “I use it just to, like, watch what’s happening, monitor the situation, stay in the know. But I, personally, have never gambled.”

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