tradional sports betting vs prediction market.

[Hispo]

With these i guess the difference is the scope, in traditional bet you only can bet is the actual game itself just the winners of the matches but recently people want to seek more which is with the polymarket that offer additional criteria of bets which people wants like as first winners on map 1, match end and etc. So its has more options to the people to put their money and chance to win, still both entertainment but of course depends on preference.

Rather than preference, I would see it is about opportunity seen by bettor for them to capitalize their knowledge on other topics which do not have anything to do with sports.
Just before a gambler is specially good at predicting football matches, it does not it mean they cannot also have the capaticity to predict geopolitical happenings.
Also, there are people who do not know anything about sports but still can pretty much into the world of fashion, so they can use these platforms to bet on beauty contests.

In the end, it is about money and way to get them thanks to our knowledge and experiences on sports and other topics which are completely unrelated.

[o48o]

What I find most interesting about Polymarket is that it is, let's say, a more reliable "source" when it comes to predictions than traditional media polls. For example, when an election poll is released, you can simply check Polymarket to see if the results align with what real people are actually betting on. Most of the time overwhelmingly so Polymarket turns out to be a much better source than biased media outlets.

Why wouldn't centralized bookmakers be any different? It's not like they want to lose money for intentionally predicting wrong thing and giving big odds for the huge masses of people betting, who are betting for obvious result.

Assuming that they would want to affect to result by giving wrong odds, would mean that everyone of them would be similarly biased and willing to lose huge amount of money just because of that.