Sports
Sports
A championship market is a season-long probability, not a bet slip. Knowing how the format decides the tail is most of the work.
Season formats do the heavy lifting: how many playoff spots exist, whether tie-breakers favour a record or a head-to-head, how a bracket seeds. Two teams with the same record can carry very different championship probabilities because of what the format does next.
Unlike a sportsbook line, an exchange price carries no built-in margin and you can sell before the whistle. That changes what a good price even means — the guide below covers the difference in full.
NFL and the Super Bowl
Seventeen games decide who gets in, and then four single-elimination rounds decide everything else. That structure, not the roster, is why no NFL favourite is ever priced anywhere near certain.
Open entryNBA championship
Basketball is the sport where the better team usually wins, because four rounds of best-of-seven leave variance very little room. That single format fact explains most of what an NBA futures market looks like.
Open entryMLB and the World Series
162 games to sort thirty teams, and then a tournament where the best team beats the worst one about six times in ten. Baseball is the sport where the regular season means most and the playoffs mean least.
Open entrySoccer leagues and cups
A league title is decided over thirty-eight matches and rewards the strongest squad. A cup is decided over a handful of nights and rewards whoever survives. The same team can be a heavy favourite for one and an outsider for the other.
Open entryFormula 1
Two championships run at once, and both are usually decided by engineering rather than driving. The rare exceptions are the years the rulebook changes - and 2026 is one of them.
Open entryTennis
A Slam is seven wins over two weeks in a bracket drawn by lot. The ranking gets a player seeded; after that the draw does more work than anything else on the board.
Open entryNHL
Sixteen teams, four rounds, sixteen wins. The part that decides the price is that nobody re-draws the bracket once it starts.
Open entryEsports
In every other sport, the rules change slowly and by committee. Here a single company can change the game itself between one tournament and the next - and does.
Open entry
How these markets resolve
- The official result recorded by the league, including how it treats abandoned or replayed fixtures.
- An award announced by its named voting body on its announcement date.
- A statistical threshold as published in the league's own official statistics.