Bettors on Crypto Prediction Platform Polymarket has in recent months developed an enviable reputation for beating bookies.

So it came as a surprise on Thursday when they got the result of the papal conclave very wrong.

The winner Robert Francis Prevost was not among the favorites where Bettors gave only the US-born cardinal about 1% chance of succeeding Pope Francis prior to the result.

The polymarket -betors, as traditional betting markets, gave Cardinal Pietro Parolin the highest odds of 28%.

With over $ 28 million of bets placed on candidates other than Prevost, the result was a totally wiped out for many bettors.

The event questions the perceived increased accuracy of betting markets such as poimark of conventional voting.

The polyme field allows users to focus on the results of everything from football fixtures to political choices. Unlike traditional betting platforms, where the house puts the odds based on its best diligence, polymarket-odds are a real-time reflection of the bets that users have placed.

In short, the more demand there is for a certain result, the higher the odds and the prices paid for the effort.

In November, the polyme field got the mainstream notoriousness when Bettors gave Republican candidate Donald Trump significantly higher odds than most other sources of winning the US presidency.

“Polymarket prices seem to wrap the views of smart money pretty well,” Koleman Stumpf, an economics professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, told Coindesk at that time, noting that the polyming field -Bettors seemed to have a small edge by predicting the election.

A historical data analysis performed by New York City-based data scientist Alex McCullough showed that the polyming field previously predicted the result of world events one month out with 90% accuracy.

What went wrong?

The reason why the Polymarket -bettors got the papal conclaver result, so wrong is that the event is extremely difficult to predict, said Domer, one of the polymarket’s top pseudonymous bettors, on X.

“It’s like going into a store that doesn’t communicate with the outside world,” he said. “Not even the participants themselves would probably know how to disability it.”

Since it is difficult for Bettors to find an edge with such esoteric effort, many defaulted on many to follow the statements of traditional betting markets and the media, resulting in close adaptation of odds between polyming and other betting markets such as Betfair.

The rarity of papal conclaves may also have made things difficult.

Pope Francis, the previous pope, was appointed in 2013, years before blockchain-based betting platforms that the polyme field existed. It is also possible that many Polymarket -bettors probably did not have any previous experience in betting on the event.

Political choices, where the polyming field has been closer to the results, is much more frequent and widely understood.

According to Domer, the real edge of betting on the papal conclave does not choose the correct candidate, but rather focus against them with too high odds.

He chalk the tall odds of heavy favorites Parolin, and Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, which the polymarket Bettors gave a 20% chance of winning, to their popularity with the public and the media.

“The pricing for Parolin and Tagle was far too high and high for not particularly good reasons,” he said.

Read more: Polymarket is 90% exactly to predict world events: Research