Before the TGA Awards Ceremony, several mysterious traders placed bets on the prediction market platform Polymarket, predicting that “Light & Shadow” would win, ultimately realizing huge profits. These “predictive insiders’” unusual operations reveal how prediction markets have become a new channel for insiders to monetize information.
(Background: From ballet dancers to the youngest female billionaire: How Luana built the billion-dollar prediction market Kalshi)
(Additional context: Why is the prediction market still in the exploratory stage? A look at the five major challenges of Prediction Markets)

Table of Contents

• The “pre-determined” script
• The historic award moments and insider payouts
• “Predictive insiders still need to eat”

Today, the much-anticipated TGA (The Game Awards) ceremony has finally concluded.

Let’s rewind three hours before the ceremony ended. At this point, the “Best Indie Game” award had just been given to the popular hit “Light & Shadow: Expedition No. 33,” but this instead caused many fans to worry: historically, no game has ever won both the “Best Indie Game” and “Game of the Year (GOTY)” awards at the TGA.

As “Light & Shadow,” a favorite for GOTY, was in the spotlight, the moment called for breaking the curse and creating an unprecedented moment in gaming history.

Just as everyone was filled with concern, a mysterious individual registered an account on a seemingly unrelated “prediction market” platform and deposited $10,000. They found the topic “Will Light & Shadow win the 2025 GOTY?” and wagered the entire $10,000 on “Yes.”

At this time, the probability represented by the “Yes” price was $0.98 per share, meaning that even if “Light & Shadow” truly made history and took both awards, their $10,000 bet would yield less than $200 in profit. However, if “Light & Shadow” failed to break the curse, the probability for that topic would instantly drop to 0, resulting in their $10,000 deposit being wiped out.

How passionate must a fan be to take such reckless risks for “Light & Shadow”? And how does the prediction market attract gamers worldwide to speculate on hot awards in advance?

The “pre-determined” script

As early as October 30, a month and a half before the ceremony, the prediction market Polymarket launched the topic “Best Game of 2025.” From the start, the winning probability for “Light & Shadow” was firmly pegged above 80%, while other highly anticipated AAA titles had their chances suppressed below 10%. Since such a one-sided situation typically occurs only in events with no suspense, this abnormality caught many traders’ attention—their suspicion was not just optimism but certainty.

Among these confident traders, a few exhibited extremely consistent strategies. DieselDiesel, trumpnogo, and kasae all bet approximately 85% odds that “Light & Shadow” would win the 2025 TGA GOTY, and they wagered amounts dozens or even hundreds of times larger than usual. This highly concentrated, abnormal betting behavior posed enormous risks: if “Light & Shadow” ultimately did not win, they would have to pay back all previous profits and face huge losses.

As time passed and the probability of “Light & Shadow” winning increased, they did not sell any of their holdings for profit. Even three hours before the award was announced—after the “Best Indie Game” was awarded—they remained seemingly prescient, unshaken, and along with the mysterious individual at the beginning of this article, gambled their entire accounts for a tiny final profit.

The historic award moment and insider payoff

Amid doubts and unease, TGA seemed to follow the script laid out by these traders over a month ago, dispelling final doubts: the highly anticipated “Light & Shadow,” which had already won the “Best Indie Game” award, broke the curse and won this year’s Game of the Year.

While the crowd cheered, the prediction market also revealed the final mystery: three traders who had predicted “Light & Shadow” would win a month earlier confirmed their role as “predictive insiders,” achieving huge profits:

DieselDiesel earned $5,357 from this event, accounting for 176% of all their other trading profits;

trumpnogo earned $2,958, accounting for 62% of all their other trading profits;

kasae earned $1,658, accounting for 220% of all their other trading profits.

The mysterious individual mentioned at the beginning (bobo9997) earned only $200 from the bet of $10,000 on the certainty that “Light & Shadow” would make history.

“Predictive insiders still need to eat”

The commonality among these four traders is that, while many questioned whether “Light & Shadow” could break the curse, they “willingly sacrificed” nearly $100,000 in positions to “bet” on this historic moment happening. Yet, their combined profits from this “gamble” amounted to less than $2,000.

Now, let’s assume these “predictive insiders” are TGA vote counting auditors. As insiders earning $100,000 annually, if they wanted to monetize their inside info traditionally, they’d have to sell it to media or platforms, risking potential fines, dismissal, or imprisonment.

However, after the prediction market appeared, they could anonymously exchange insider info for real money equivalent to one to three months of their disposable income.

Seeing it this way—assuming they already knew the result in advance—it all becomes clear: with “Light & Shadow” already confirmed as the 2025 GOTY at 100%, their final “bet” was just waiting an hour before the award ceremony, turning what seemed like a risky gamble into an almost risk-free $2,000 profit.

Such seemingly risky, but actually risk-free, “bets” on making money would have been nearly impossible before prediction market platforms like Polymarket emerged.

But with the growing popularity of Polymarket, how many can resist turning insider info into real cash anonymously?

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Tags: Polymarket TGA insider trading gaming industry prediction markets