Smallprint by Sharpbook
You bet on the title.
You get paid on the rules.
We read the settlement rules of political and news markets on Kalshi and Polymarket and tell you, in plain English, what actually pays out. Any market we haven't read yet, you can have read on the spot. No predictions. No tips. Just what the words say.
Biggest markets where the rules don't match the title
Browse all →Most money at stake first, on both venues. Every line is one sentence from the rules themselves.
The first read is running. Check back in a few minutes.
The weekly five
Every Sunday: five big open markets whose rules don't say what the title says, every rules change we caught that week, and the exact clause behind each. One email, no fluff.
This has happened before
- Cardi B at the Super Bowl halftime show. Same question on both venues. Kalshi paid Yes holders 26 cents. Polymarket paid a full dollar.
- Khamenei out as Supreme Leader. Kalshi's rules said a leader leaving only through death pays the last traded price, not a dollar. Polymarket paid Yes in full.
- The day the shutdown ended. The bill was signed on the 12th. The market paid the 13th.
- US strategic bitcoin reserve. The order created the reserve. The market still resolved No, because seized coins did not count.
How it works
Several times a day we pull the rules text of every open non-sports market on both venues. Each unique text is read once and turned into a fixed set of facts: what triggers Yes, who decides, by when, and what looks like a win but isn't. Plain code turns those facts into the card. The model never writes the verdict, so the same rules always give the same card.
Every claim on a card carries the exact sentence it came from, checked against the document before it is stored. If the rules are too vague to summarise, we say so. That is a signal too.