Dead Pool Betting Explained

I found several modern formats while researching the market in 2026, and they should not be treated as the same product. A free community contest has different rules and legal implications from a sportsbook accepting real-money wagers. Prediction markets add another structure, with prices formed by traders rather than a bookmaker.

Direct celebrity death betting still exists, but it is a niche market. Some platforms offer it, some allow only related predictions, and several regulators or regulated exchanges expressly reject markets based on the death of a living person.

Can You Actually Bet on Celebrity Deaths?

Yes, although there is no single market called “celebrity death betting.” I found direct sportsbook wagers, free community pools and prediction markets that approach the subject in different ways. Whether real money is involved depends on the format.

Direct Real-Money Markets

I checked MyBookie and confirmed that it still lists dedicated Death Matchups and Celebrity Death Pool sections. This is the clearest current example I found of a sportsbook offering direct real-money betting on celebrity deaths.

MyBookie's availability also does not establish that the product is legal everywhere the website can be accessed. The legal treatment of death-related wagers depends on the bettor's jurisdiction and the structure of the market, which I examine later in this guide.

Free Community Dead Pools

Traditional dead pools often remove real-money betting altogether and use points instead.

The 2026 Derby Dead Pool rules require 20 main picks plus substitutes. Points depend on age bands and several bonus rules, while a qualifying obituary is required before a death scores.

The 2026 Ship of Fools Celebrity Death Pool uses a different structure. Participants can submit up to 13 names, there are no prizes, and the base scoring formula is 100 minus age at death.

Both are useful examples of a traditional dead pool, but neither should be confused with a sportsbook accepting cash wagers.

Prediction Markets

Prediction platforms add another model because prices can be formed by participants rather than set by a bookmaker.

Manifold has hosted direct questions about whether named public figures will die within a defined period. These markets use Mana, the platform's play-money currency, so they provide probability forecasts without real-money payouts.

Polymarket International provides a real-money example with an important distinction. I found a 2026 contract asking who will rank first in Google's global Passings search category. Traders can buy and sell contracts, but the market is not a direct wager on whether a particular person will die. Its settlement depends on Google's eventual ranking, so it is better described as death-related rather than a direct death market.

Kalshi shows why these categories should not be treated as interchangeable. The CFTC-regulated U.S. exchange explicitly lists death markets in its banned-markets policy, alongside assassination, war and kidnapping markets. A platform can therefore offer real-money prediction contracts while refusing direct death contracts altogether.

The distinction matters throughout the rest of the article. A community dead pool, a sportsbook death wager and a prediction-market contract may look similar because all involve uncertain future events, but their scoring, settlement and legal treatment can be very different.

How Dead Pools Work

There is no standard dead-pool rulebook. I compared several active competitions and found substantial differences in the number of picks, eligibility rules, scoring and verification requirements.

Choosing the Picks

Participants usually submit a fixed list before the competition starts.

• Derby Dead Pool accepts 20 main names plus substitutes.
• Ship of Fools allows up to 13.
• GoActuary uses 15 regular selections plus five separate under-50 picks.

Most pools also impose some form of notability requirement.

• Derby requires a genuine public figure and excludes people whose public profile exists only because they are terminally ill.
• GoActuary normally expects a qualifying Wikipedia page.

A prediction can therefore fail to score even if the person dies during the competition period, because the original pick may not have met the eligibility rules.

Scoring the Picks

There is no standard mathematical formula for dead-pool scoring.

I found several different systems among active pools:

Ship of Fools uses:

Points = 100 − age at death

If a successful pick dies at 67:

100 − 67 = 33 points

That is a scoring rule, not a mortality model.

Derby Dead Pool also rewards younger outcomes, but through age bands. A death at ages 18–29 is worth 12 base points, while ages 90–99 receive five. The pool then adds bonuses, including extra points for a unique selection.

GoActuary is different again. Participants rank their selections by confidence, and the rank determines the points available. Age does not set the regular base score.

The scoring system also determines how the overall winner is decided. Most annual pools run for a defined period, often January 1 to December 31, and the participant with the highest final score wins. Other competitions may give more weight to the number of successful picks or use a ranking system.

What Counts as a Successful Pick?

A death does not necessarily generate points as soon as it happens. The pool's verification rules still have to be satisfied.

The Derby Dead Pool rules require qualifying coverage from a specified group of national news sources, including the BBC, Reuters UK, the Financial Times, The Guardian, Sky News and ITV. Ship of Fools uses a broader major-news standard.

Timing can also matter. A person could die on December 31 while reliable confirmation appears on January 2. Derby uses the actual local date and time of death rather than the publication date.

Its rules also cover less straightforward cases. A previously missing person scores only if the death can be confirmed as having occurred during the relevant competition year. Certain cases where the timing of death cannot be verified reliably receive separate treatment.

The cause of death may affect scoring as well. Some pools count any cause, while others apply exclusions or bonuses. Derby, for example, awards additional points for certain unnatural causes and has separate rules for people already awaiting state execution.

These are rules of individual competitions, not universal rules for all dead pools.

How Sportsbook and Prediction-Market Bets Are Settled

Sportsbook and prediction-market products need a defined outcome that can be formally settled.

MyBookie's general wagering rules state that the operator may void wagers if a market was offered when the result was already known. They also allow settlement to be delayed when an outcome cannot yet be officially verified and allow a market to be voided if verification ultimately proves impossible.

MyBookie does not publish a separate rulebook for celebrity death markets. Its public rules do not specify a dedicated obituary source or explain how every death-specific edge case is settled, including delayed announcements.

Prediction markets use their own resolution systems. Polymarket's resolution process relies on predefined criteria and allows outcomes to be disputed.

The market title describes the broad prediction, but the written settlement criteria determine what must happen for a wager or contract to resolve.

Is Dead Pool Betting Legal?

There is no universal legal status for dead pool betting. A free prediction game, a private wager between friends and a commercial sportsbook market can fall under very different rules.

The jurisdictions I checked illustrate four main approaches.

Great Britain: A Broad Definition of Betting

Section 9 of the Gambling Act 2005 defines betting broadly enough to include wagers on an event or on the likelihood of something occurring or not occurring.

A bet on whether a person dies before a specified date can therefore fall within the statutory concept of betting even though the event has nothing to do with sport.

Commercial betting requires the appropriate regulatory framework. The Act also contains limited private-betting exceptions, so it would be inaccurate to assume that every informal pool between friends receives the same treatment.

This framework applies to England, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland has separate gambling legislation.

Private-Bet Exceptions: Canada and New Zealand

Canada provides a useful contrast. Section 204 of the Criminal Code contains an explicit exception for a private bet between individuals who are not engaged in the business of betting.

That exception does not give a commercial website a general right to sell pools or take public wagers. Those activities raise separate questions under Canada's gambling framework and provincial law.

New Zealand also recognises private gambling under defined conditions. Its Gambling Act 2003 distinguishes qualifying private social gambling from commercial bookmaking.

These examples show why “a few friends running a pool” and “a business selling death bets” should not be treated as legally equivalent.

Direct Restrictions: Northern Territory and Western Australia

Australia provides two unusually clear examples.

The Northern Territory Novelty Market Guideline states that a licensed novelty market must not involve the death of a living person or animal.

Western Australia's bookmaker conditions contain a similar restriction on markets involving the death of a living person or animal.

These rules apply within their respective jurisdictions. They do not establish a single national rule for every private or commercial arrangement in Australia.

United States: State and Federal Rules Can Overlap

The U.S. position is more fragmented.

Ordinary gambling law is largely state-based, while federally regulated prediction markets can also fall under the Commodity Exchange Act and CFTC oversight.

The CFTC's June 2026 proposed event-contract framework discusses sensitive contracts involving assassination, war, insider information and incentives to cause harmful outcomes. It also distinguishes natural death from assassination in its analysis of how contracts should be classified. It is still a proposal, not a nationwide rule making every natural-death contract legal or illegal.

Other countries take narrower approaches:

• Ireland regulates commercial betting through its licensing system.
• Germany's gambling regulator states that non-sporting Gesellschaftswetten are not licensable sportsbook products.
• France similarly restricts legal online wagering to authorised categories such as approved sports and horse-racing betting.

Can Death Risk Be Estimated?

There is a real mathematical science behind mortality risk, but it comes from actuarial science, demography and survival analysis, not from dead-pool scoring systems.

I would separate three types of probability:

Actuarial and Survival Models

A life table gives a population-level probability of death at a particular age.

The U.S. Social Security Administration publishes mortality probabilities by age and sex. In plain language:

Annual mortality probability at age x = probability that a person aged x dies before reaching age x + 1

If a population table gives a one-year mortality estimate of 8%, its purely mathematical fair decimal price is:

Fair decimal odds = 1 ÷ estimated probability

1 ÷ 0.08 = 12.50

The limitation is important. An 8% population estimate does not mean a particular public figure has exactly an 8% chance of dying.

More advanced survival models can use additional variables, but individual prediction remains difficult. A 2026 study published in Demography tested 12 statistical and machine-learning approaches using more than 150 predictors. The models could distinguish higher- and lower-risk people reasonably well but still left much of the variation in individual lifespan unexplained.

The problem becomes larger with celebrities because reliable private medical data is normally unavailable. Public reports, photographs and rumours are poor substitutes for validated clinical information.

Prediction-Market Prices

Prediction markets provide a different kind of estimate.

A binary contract trading near $0.20 is commonly described as carrying about a 20% market-implied probability when the winning contract pays $1.

Research by Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz found that prediction markets can aggregate dispersed information and generate useful forecasts. Their later research also explains why market prices should not be treated as exact objective probabilities.

Markets have failure modes of their own. Research has found calibration problems and favourite-longshot effects, particularly over longer horizons. Thin markets can also be heavily affected by a small number of trades.

There is not enough academic evidence to claim that these exact biases occur at the same rate in celebrity-death markets. They are reasons to treat a niche market price as one signal rather than a definitive probability.

Using Probability in a Dead Pool

For a points competition:

Expected points = estimated probability × points awarded

Suppose two fictional picks have these estimates:

For A:

0.20 × 10 = 2.0 expected points

For B:

0.05 × 30 = 1.5 expected points

Pick B offers three times as many points but still has the lower expected score under these assumptions.

Unique-pick bonuses can change the calculation again. If points increase only when nobody else made the same selection, the expected value depends on both mortality risk and how competitors are likely to choose.

For fixed sportsbook odds:

Implied probability = 1 ÷ decimal odds

At odds of 5.00:

1 ÷ 5.00 = 0.20 = 20%

A probability estimate would have to exceed 20% before the bet even appears to have positive expected value, before accounting for uncertainty.

The result is only as useful as the probability estimate behind it. No validated model can reliably tell us when one particular living person will die.

Why Are Death Markets Controversial?

The objections go beyond the subject simply feeling uncomfortable. Regulators and researchers have identified problems involving incentives, inside information, market integrity and public standards.

Influencing the Outcome

A market becomes especially problematic when a participant can affect the event that determines the payout.

The CFTC's 2026 proposed framework discusses this concern for contracts involving assassination and other harmful events. A financial payoff can create an incentive to facilitate or encourage the event itself.

Great Britain's Gambling Commission has dealt with the same underlying problem in a different novelty market. In the Sun Bets “piegate” case, the regulator found that a novelty wager could create an incentive for someone connected to the event to influence the outcome. The operator accepted additional licence conditions and paid £84,000 to socially responsible causes.

That case was not about celebrity deaths. It shows why regulators examine whether the person being bet on, or someone close to the event, can affect settlement.

Inside Information

Death-related markets also create an unusual information problem.

The UK Gambling Commission's policy on inside information expressly applies to non-sporting betting events as well as sport.

Prediction markets have produced real enforcement cases. In August 2026, the CFTC found that a White House teleprompter operator had used non-public information about presidential speeches to trade prediction contracts, generating more than $107,000 in profits before the enforcement action.

A celebrity death market could create the same structural imbalance. Family members, representatives, medical staff or people present during an emergency may know material information before it reaches the public. I found no evidence that these groups are routinely trading death contracts. The issue is unequal access to information.

Public Standards and Ethics

Some regulators set a simpler product-level boundary.

Northern Territory and Western Australia prohibit licensed wagering markets based on the death of a living person. Their rules also refer to concepts such as offensiveness, poor taste and normal public standards.

Academic work has examined the same topic from an ethical perspective. Daniel Weijers and Vadim Keyser's research on prediction markets and betting on matters of life and death discusses why these markets can generate moral repugnance and how their purpose affects the ethical judgement.

That does not establish that every prediction involving death is unethical. A market forecasting mortality from a disease may have genuine public-health value. A contract whose only purpose is financial gain from the death of one named living person is harder to defend on the same informational grounds.

Responsible Gambling

A free community pool and a real-money wager carry different financial risks. Once money is staked, I would treat the activity like any other form of gambling: set a spending limit in advance, do not increase stakes to recover losses and use deposit limits, time-outs or self-exclusion where available.

Real-money availability also does not establish legality. Age requirements and gambling rules depend on jurisdiction. Anyone concerned about their gambling can use Gambling Therapy for free international support and information about local services.