A Polymarket trader transformed a $676 bet into approximately $67,608 in seconds, monetizing on a rare winner announcement mistake. When the UFC official announcer, Bruce Buffer, announced the wrong winner for a fight in the heavyweight category.
The prelim card fight between Tyrell Fortune and Marcin Tybura ended with Fortune winning via unanimous decision.
The incorrect announcement caused chaos in the crowd. When announcer Bruce Buffer read the scorecards in favor of Tybura, declaring him the winner. The announcement stunned the crowd, leading Fortune to begin exiting the Octagon, while Tybura celebrated. Less than a minute later, Buffer corrected himself, apologized to the fighters and audience, and properly announced Fortune as the victor.
Prediction markets react instantly to confusion
That short gap of confusion created an insane opportunity on Polymarket, the leading decentralized prediction market platform. A trader named LlamaEnjoyer on Polymarket was watching closely. Following the initial wrong announcement, Fortune’s shares on the prediction market collapsed to roughly $0.01, while Tybura’s shares surged to $0.99.
The trader at first considered placing a massive $100,000 order on Tybura at the 99-cent mark, assuming the win was final. The trader felt something was off, suspecting the announcement didn’t match the fight’s reality,
The trader canceled that order and instead scooped up 67,608 shares of Fortune for just $676, literally a penny per share.
Correction turns pennies into a 100x gain
Seconds later, as the UFC corrected the mistake and a commentator announced, We have a mistake, Fortune’s shares re-priced to $1.00. The trader later posted a screenshot of the win on X, calling it the “easiest 100x ever.”
This smooth trade shows us the extreme speed at which odds on prediction markets can fluctuate during live events. At the same time, it shows the importance of verification rather than blindly following the first public announcement.
Currently, prediction markets like Polymarket, Kalshi, and Opinion are among the fastest-growing sectors in crypto. The platform, with its more than 865,000 users betting on everything from sports to political happenings, also attracted a $600 million investment from ICE, the company that owns the NYSE
