🔮 He Made $300k Betting on a “Narcissistic Sociopath”

How “RememberAmalek” saw through skewed polls to predict Zohran Mamdani’s win, and what he’s betting on now

RememberAmalek is a top-ranked Polymarket whale, specializing in high-conviction directional bets on elections and geopolitics. His latest score was $300k in the NYC mayoral primary, where he began buying shares of Zohran Mamdani at 8% odds. The Oracle caught up with him Wednesday to discuss his forecasting strategy and what he’s betting on now.

This interview has been edited for length. All answers are his own.

How did you get started with prediction markets?

I jumped in around four years ago. I made some profit initially but lost it all degen betting on tweet markets. After Biden’s campaign imploded, I joined Polymarket and immediately lost $25k betting against Biden dropping out. I also donated 5k to [another Polymarket whale] aenews betting against Deadpool. I really hated that movie and thought it would do terribly.

That's when I realized I needed to actually develop a strategy. My first big win was Tim Walz for VP when everyone was focused on Mark Kelly and Josh Shapiro. That recouped all my Biden losses. Before the Walz win, I had re-deposited $800 which I ran back up to my current bankroll of about $1.4m.

Walk me through the Walz bet. He was quite a longshot for most of the VP race.

I saw Walz was mispriced because of flawed thinking about the other candidates. Mark Kelly had issues in vetting, and JB Pritzker was too difficult to vet, he had submitted like 16,000 pages of financial documents. Josh Shapiro was the heavy favorite, but I had done research on the multiple skeletons in his closet. The big one was he had called the ex-wife of his assistant, I believe, and threatened to ruin her career, said he was going to ‘bury’ her. I don't think it's come out, but I believe there is actually a recording of that voicemail. There was this murder case from when he was attorney general that would've been a nightmare.

So I felt it was really just Walz versus Shapiro, and once I dug into Shapiro's past, I knew they couldn't pick him. The market was giving Walz 15-20% odds when it should've been closer to 50-50. Sometimes the best trades come from understanding why the favorites are overvalued.

Big night last night in NYC politics. What did you see early on about Mamdani?

I started buying Mamdani at 8%. I saw him as consistently second in the market despite low polls. Early on, I put in a lot of work studying his speeches and campaign, I realized this guy was brilliant, but a narcissistic sociopath. He knew exactly how to hide it and play the political game. At this point, I saw him as one of the two main contenders in the race, so was happy to keep buying him until around 50-50.

Why do you say he was a sociopath?

There was this interview on globalize the intifada where he showed these fake crocodile tears, like “oh woe is me,” but at the same time had this look of just pure pride and pure joy like, "Oh, I'm winning my campaign right now. Look at these idiots." He walks around with this kind of FDR type paternalism of, you know, woe is me for the burden of having to solve all the poor's problems. But at the same time it’s this combination of ruthlessness and political skill that wins elections.

Why didn’t you sell when the odds were closer to 50-50? How did you develop the conviction to keep holding through the election?

The big opportunity came from a Marist poll in June that I knew was fake and intentionally misleading. The headline number showed Mamdani way behind Cuomo, 45% to 55% when my analysis said he was ahead. If you look carefully at that poll, there was an objective, mathematically verifiable way to prove their numbers were wrong. I don’t want to say exactly how I knew the poll was BS, but if you look into the crosstabs, you can see how their internal data doesn’t support the headline number.

When that poll dropped and the market believed it, I loaded up. By mid-day, I saw it as a two-horse race between Mamdani and Cuomo, while everyone else was distracted by noise.

What are some of your other big wins?

I made around half a million dollars on the South Korean election because I understood two things the market was missing.

First, exit polling is legally prohibited in South Korea until election day. Second, early voting there is relatively new. Only the last two elections have had it. So when the exit poll showed the leading candidate at 51% on election day, the market went crazy buying [that vote share bracket]. But I knew that poll was based on incomplete data from just the final day of voting.

The market was trading on the "historical accuracy" of Korean exit polls that literally couldn't exist. They'd only done this methodology for one cycle. It's prohibited by law for exit polling in South Korea to be good. They have to do all their sampling on the last day and then try to estimate a week of early voting that was never actually polled.

So when that 51% number came out, I doubled down while everyone else was buying. The actual result? 49.4%.

There was also a good deal of conventional wisdom that was just wrong. South Korea isn't really an independent country. It's one of the few nations that's effectively a U.S. colony. They didn't even have control of their own military until the 1990s. The KCIA and CIA have rigged South Korean elections as recently as 10 years ago.

So when people were saying "Trump wants the PPP to win," I knew they were wrong. The blob in DC wants the PPP. They've been grooming them for years. If Trump wanted anyone to win, it was Lee Jae-myung. There's a reason Trump never defended President Yoon, even when Yoon tried to start a second Korean War to justify martial law.

Understanding that dynamic, that Korea is occupied, that past elections have been interfered with, that you have to factor in who the real power brokers want, that's as important as understanding the exit poll methodology. You can't trade these markets without understanding the real power structures.

It doesn’t sound like you limit yourself to a certain region. Where would you say your edge comes from?

My edge comes from going deeper than anyone else is willing to go. I don't use Twitter or mainstream news. I study the big variables: election history, serious academic papers, legal frameworks. For major bets, I'll spend dozens of hours researching until I find the key piece of information everyone else missed.

Take polling. Most people just look at the top-line numbers. I dig into the methodology, the crosstabs, the sampling. I can spot when a poll is mathematically wrong based on their own internal data. That's not something you find in a news article. You have to piece it together yourself.

I also have actual sources, contacts in governments around the world from my family's business. When the Syrian government was about to fall, I knew because everyone I know in Damascus was fleeing. You can't get that from reading the news.

But I think my biggest edge is psychological / behavioral. There are some traders who profit by being the first to price in new news. I’m the complete opposite. When news breaks, I wait. I watch how the market reacts. Most people panic and make emotional decisions in 5 seconds. The best opportunities come when everyone else is panicking over some headline that drops. I've seen people incinerate $100k because of a rumor that never materializes.

Fundamentally, I look for instances where conventional wisdom is built on false premises, like those Korean exit polls, or that fake Mamdani poll.

Looking at your portfolio, I don’t see any major concentrated bets right now. What are you looking at for the next big trades?

Right now I'm heavy on Iran markets, with bets basically of an uneasy status quo continuing, that Iran won't close the Strait of Hormuz, and no US war declaration. Iran can't afford to destroy their own economy when 25% of their GDP comes from oil exports through the strait. They'll just wait out the current administration.

I'm starting to research and position for Bolivia's election in August.

My biggest conviction bet that isn't on Polymarket yet is that Somalia's government has a good chance of falling to al-Shabaab, say 50-50. It'll be Trump's biggest foreign policy disaster, tied to the AMISOM withdrawal. The government only controls Mogadishu now. Puntland has declared independence, Somaliland's gone. Al-Shabaab controls rural Somalia and has 80% support there now versus 20% a decade ago. What I’m seeing is basically a repeat of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in the mid 90s.

For the NYC general, I’m obviously not a Mamdani fan. But the only shot to defeat him would be if Cuomo, and the independents all drop out and consolidate around Adams, who is the only one who can beat him. If Mamdani wins, you'll see a progressive Democrat nominee in 2028 for president. This will be a Trump-like figure from the left who'll destroy centrist Democrats.

Final advice for new traders?

The more trades you make, the harder it is to make money long term. It’s just how the markets work. You see this in the leaderboards. There are just a handful of accounts who have made a lot of money trading across hundreds of markets.

I’ve learned to focus on fewer, bigger, highly researched bets. I've never seen a small account betting on everything become profitable. When you have real conviction based on deep research, size up.

If anyone wants to connect, I have a Discord server, PolySquare, where I talk about trades and am happy to talk with anyone there.

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