---
title: "How Many Polymarket Sports Bettors Are Profitable? A Census of 36,149 Wallets"
canonical: "https://0xinsider.com/research/how-many-polymarket-sports-bettors-are-profitable"
datePublished: "2026-09-13"
dateModified: "2026-09-13"
description: "Of 36,149 Polymarket wallets with 20 or more settled sports markets, 48.8% are in profit and the median wallet is $8 down. The top 1% hold 68% of the gross profit. The profitable half wins 64% at the same entry price the rest pay."
---

# How Many Polymarket Sports Bettors Are Profitable? A Census of 36,149 Wallets

Last updated: 2026-09-13
Canonical: https://0xinsider.com/research/how-many-polymarket-sports-bettors-are-profitable

The usual answer to how many sports bettors are profitable is a few percent, and it comes from sportsbooks. Polymarket has no bookmaker and every wallet is public, so the question can be counted. Of 36,149 wallets with 20 or more settled sports markets as of September 13, 2026, 48.8% are in profit, the median wallet is $8 down, and 362 wallets hold 68% of the gross profit. The profitable half wins 64.1% of its decided markets at an average entry of 55.2 cents; the rest win 49.1% at 53.0 cents.

## The usual answer comes from the bookmaker's side

Ask how many sports bettors make money and the answer is a small number: two, three or five percent, depending on who is quoting it. The figure has no public dataset behind it. It is a bookmaker's view of a bookmaker's customers, and a bookmaker charges 4.55% of every dollar at a standard -110 line, so most of its customers lose by construction.

Polymarket is a different market. There is no line to shade and no house on the other side of the bet. A bettor who buys a team at 60 cents is trading with a bettor who sold it, and the market keeps a small fee. Every position is public, settles on chain, and belongs to a wallet address.

That makes the question countable. This study counts it: how many Polymarket sports wallets are up, by how much, how concentrated the winnings are, and what the winning half does differently from the losing half.

## 36,149 wallets with 20 or more settled sports markets

0xinsider keeps a per-wallet record for every Polymarket wallet in every category: settled markets, wins, losses, realized P&L, the average entry price, and the calibration edge, which is the gap between how often the wallet won and the price it paid. This study reads that record for the sports categories, Soccer, Basketball, Esports, Tennis, Hockey, Baseball, Football, MMA, Cricket, Golf, Boxing and Polymarket's generic Sports tag, as of September 13, 2026.

A market counts when the wallet had $20 or more at stake and a valid entry price on the side it held, and the market has settled. A wallet enters a category's record at five such markets. Across the sports categories that is 59,700 wallets and 13,155,936 settled wallet-markets. The study population is the 36,149 wallets with 20 or more settled sports markets in total, because 20 is roughly where a record starts to describe the bettor rather than the month. The sample-size section of 0xinsider.com/learn/sports-betting-analytics-guide has the arithmetic.

P&L is realized P&L on settled markets, summed. Open positions, unsettled markets and anything outside the sports categories are not in it.

## Half the wallets are up, and the median is eight dollars down

Of the 36,149 wallets, 17,633 are in profit: 48.8%, give or take half a point. The median wallet is $8 down. The tenth percentile is $10,889 down and the ninetieth is $11,318 up.

So the answer is about half, on a market with no bookmaker's margin. That is the number a fair market with a small fee should produce: slightly under half, because the fee and the spread come out of somebody.

The shape around the median says more than the median. 10.6% of wallets have lost more than $10,000 and 10.7% have won more than $10,000. Four in ten sit within a thousand dollars of zero either way. The chart below is the distribution.

## The top 1% hold 68% of the profit

Rank the 36,149 wallets by P&L and the money sits at the ends. The top 1%, 362 wallets, have won $395.1 million between them, 68% of the gross profit of every profitable wallet in the population, with a median of $510,258 each. The next 9% have won $156.0 million. The remaining 40% of profitable wallets share $30.2 million, a median of about a thousand dollars each.

The losing side is the mirror. The bottom 10%, 3,610 wallets, have lost $401.1 million, a median of $28,579 each. The 40% of wallets just below the middle have lost $30.7 million between them.

The population's net is $149.5 million in profit. It is above zero because the population is only wallets with 20 or more settled sports markets. The wallets with fewer, the market makers whose fills settle elsewhere, and the fee are on the other side of it.

## Sport by sport, from soccer to cricket

Split by sport, counting wallets with 20 or more settled markets in that sport, the share in profit runs from 48.1% in soccer to 57.4% in cricket. Soccer, basketball, esports and tennis, the four largest populations, sit within a point of half. Baseball, hockey and football sit two to three points above it. MMA and cricket, the smallest populations in the table, sit five to seven points above.

The intervals widen as the populations shrink. Soccer's 48.1% is good to seven tenths of a point across 20,775 wallets; cricket's 57.4% is good to about three points across 1,162. Golf, 448 wallets at 53.8%, and boxing, 67 wallets at 65.7%, are below the table's floor of a thousand wallets.

Median P&L is within $30 of zero in every sport with a thousand wallets except MMA, at $80. The tenth and ninetieth percentiles are wider in esports and football than elsewhere: a tenth-percentile esports wallet is $9,152 down and a ninetieth-percentile one $10,634 up. Basketball and Football are Polymarket's canonical categories, so basketball includes the NBA, the WNBA and college basketball, and football includes the NFL and college football.

## Experience raises the share in profit, slowly

Group the wallets by how many sports markets they have settled and the share in profit rises with experience, but slowly. Wallets with 20 to 49 settled markets are in profit 47.4% of the time. At 100 to 499 it is 48.9%. At 500 to 1,999 it is 50.5%. At 2,000 or more, 1,082 wallets, it is 57.1%, and the median wallet in that band is $2,550 up. The 23,551 wallets with 5 to 19 settled markets are outside the study population and are shown for comparison; 47.8% of them are up.

The spread of outcomes widens much faster than the share. The ninetieth-percentile wallet in the 2,000-plus band is $165,039 up and the tenth-percentile one is $74,370 down. Experience does not make the bet safer. It makes the result bigger, in both directions.

The average calibration edge runs the other way, from 3.95 points in the 5-to-19 band down to 1.60 in the 2,000-plus band. Two things are in that. A short record's edge is mostly noise, and the wallets that stayed past five markets are the ones whose first markets went well. And a large edge on a handful of markets is a smaller number in dollars than a modest edge on thousands. The share in profit and the median P&L are the better readings of what experience does.

## What the grade means in dollars

Every wallet in the population has a current 0xinsider grade, S to F, from its latest daily ranking. The grade is built from the wallet's settled record, so this section describes what each letter means in sports dollars. It is not a test of whether the grade predicts anything. The prediction test is the sharp money study at 0xinsider.com/research/sharp-money-polymarket-sports, which scores each buy against the grade the wallet held before the game.

S wallets, 218 of them, are in profit 85.8% of the time with a median sports P&L of $124,465. A wallets are in profit 74.2% of the time, median $3,360. B wallets 79.4%, median $6,946. C wallets 72.6%, median $493. D wallets, the largest group at 37% of the population, are in profit 40.0% of the time, median $51 down. F wallets, 26.4% of the population, are in profit 24.6% of the time, median $4,618 down.

In net dollars the six letters are two groups. S, A, B and C wallets have won $385.6 million between them. D wallets sit at $0.9 million. F wallets have lost $237 million. The 9,546 F wallets are a quarter of the population and carry most of its losses.

## The profitable half pays a better price

The two halves of the population pay almost the same average entry price: 55.2 cents for the profitable wallets and 53.0 cents for the rest. They win at different rates: 64.1% of decided markets against 49.1%. The profitable half is buying outcomes that happen more often than the price says. The other half is buying outcomes that happen about as often as a coin flip, at a price above 50 cents.

The calibration edge says the same thing per wallet. The profitable half has a mean edge of plus 6.15 points and a median of plus 3.55, and 81.9% of those wallets have a positive edge. The unprofitable half has a mean of minus 1.13 and a median of minus 0.77, and 41.0% are positive.

Run it the other way and the edge sorts the money. Of the 22,026 wallets with a positive calibration edge, 65.6% are in profit, median $458 up. Of the 14,123 with an edge at or below zero, 22.6% are in profit, median $1,102 down. The edge is a per-market average and P&L is a dollar sum, so they disagree on a wallet that sizes badly, and on about a third of wallets they do. Across the population, the wallets that are up are the wallets that paid less than the outcome was worth.

## What this study does not show

It is a snapshot of realized P&L on settled markets as of one date. A wallet that is $5,000 up on settled markets and $8,000 down on open ones reads as $5,000 up. A position closed before settlement is in the settled figure at what it realized.

It does not see fees separately, it does not count markets under $20 at stake, and it counts a wallet's sports record only in categories where the wallet has five or more settled markets. A wallet is an address. One person can run several and several people can share one.

The population is wallets that kept betting. A wallet that lost its first ten markets and stopped never reached 20 and is not counted, while a wallet that won its first ten was more likely to keep going. That selection raises the share in profit by an amount this data cannot measure. The 5-to-19 band's 47.8% is a partial view of it.

The grade section is descriptive. The grade is computed from the same settled history that produced the P&L, so a high grade beside a high P&L is the grade doing its job. For prediction, read the sharp money study.

And a share in profit is not a return. A wallet $8 up over 500 markets and $2 million staked has made nothing. This study answers who is up. The return on stake is a different question with a different denominator.

## What it means for a sports bettor

On a market with no bookmaker's margin, about half of the bettors who stick around are ahead. That is the whole difference between a fair price and a shaded one, and it is the argument for betting where the price is fair.

Being ahead and being paid are different things. Half the population is up and 1% of it holds two thirds of the money. The middle 80% of wallets sits within about $30,000 of zero after hundreds or thousands of markets. A bettor who wants to be in the top 1% needs an edge that survives thousands of markets. A bettor who wants to stop losing needs to stop paying more than the outcome is worth, which is what separates the two halves.

The measure that separates them is public. The calibration edge, win rate minus average price paid, is on every Polymarket wallet's 0xinsider profile, including yours. It tells you which half you are in before the P&L does.

## How to use it on 0xinsider

Open your own wallet on 0xinsider and the profile shows the numbers this study reads: settled markets, win rate, average entry price, calibration edge, realized P&L and the grade, with the category badges that set the sports record apart from anything else you trade. That is the record to grade yourself on. The P&L alone is a sum that can hide a bad price behind a good month.

The leaderboard at 0xinsider.com/leaderboard ranks wallets by that record, and every profile's calibration edge sits beside its win rate, so a 90% win rate at 88 cents reads as what it is. The sports boards, 0xinsider.com/sports/soccer, 0xinsider.com/sports/nba, 0xinsider.com/sports/tennis, 0xinsider.com/sports/esports and the rest, show for each game which side the profitable wallets are on. That is the S, A and B cohort this study describes in dollars.

The guide at 0xinsider.com/learn/how-to-become-a-profitable-sports-bettor turns this study into a set of habits, and 0xinsider.com/learn/prediction-market-trader-grades-explained covers what each letter means.

## How to check it yourself

Every number on this page comes from one read-only run of a set of queries against the production database at 16:13 UTC on September 13, 2026. The query text and the raw output are public at github.com/0xinsider/research, under polymarket-sports-markets, in the files whose names carry the words wallet-census.

The query reads the per-wallet category table for the twelve sports categories, adds each wallet's rows together, and counts. Nothing is sampled and nothing is modelled. The intervals on the shares are plain binomial half-widths, which is all a population share needs.

Rerun it and the counts will be higher. Wallets keep settling markets and crossing 20, and every P&L moves with every settlement. The share in profit should hold within a point. The top 1% figure moves with a handful of large wallets and is the number most likely to change.

## FAQ

### What percentage of Polymarket sports bettors are profitable?

48.8% of the 36,149 Polymarket wallets with 20 or more settled sports markets were in profit as of September 13, 2026, on realized P&L across the sports categories. The median wallet was $8 down, the tenth percentile $10,889 down and the ninetieth $11,318 up.

### How much do the best Polymarket sports bettors make?

The top 1% of the population, 362 wallets, had won $395.1 million between them, a median of $510,258 each, which is 68% of the gross profit of every profitable wallet. The bottom 10% had lost $401.1 million, a median of $28,579 each.

### Which sport has the most profitable Polymarket bettors?

Among sports with at least 1,000 wallets holding 20 or more settled markets, cricket had the highest share in profit at 57.4% and MMA the next at 55.4%. Soccer, the largest population at 20,775 wallets, was lowest at 48.1%. The smaller populations carry intervals of two to three points.

### Does experience make a sports bettor profitable?

Slowly. Wallets with 20 to 49 settled sports markets were in profit 47.4% of the time; wallets with 2,000 or more were in profit 57.1% of the time with a median P&L of $2,550. The spread of outcomes widened far faster than the share: the ninetieth-percentile wallet in the 2,000-plus band was $165,039 up and the tenth-percentile one $74,370 down.

### What do profitable Polymarket sports bettors do differently?

They pay a better price for the same kind of bet. The profitable half won 64.1% of its decided markets at an average entry of 55.2 cents; the unprofitable half won 49.1% at 53.0 cents. The profitable half's mean calibration edge was plus 6.15 points against minus 1.13, and 81.9% of profitable wallets had a positive edge against 41.0% of the rest.