Betting on the Wedding Featured in The New York Times

We are so honored to share that Betting on the Wedding was featured in The New York Times.

In a Field Notes piece titled "Want to Bet on My Wedding?", The Times looked at how prediction markets and prop betting are moving from sportsbooks into wedding receptions, and how more couples are building friendly wagers into their celebrations.

How It Started

Stacy and Greg Stahl, from St. Louis, have spent almost 10 years betting on various aspects of their friends' weddings, from who would say the vows first to whether the ceremony would last longer than 20 minutes. Just for the fun of it.

"It started with a certain friend group," Stacy told The Times. "We started betting at that first friend's wedding, and since then, we bet at every subsequent wedding of that friend group. By the end of it, we were including almost everyone in the wedding, including the father of the bride, the uncles and so much of the extended family."

In 2023, the couple decided to turn that pastime into a business and developed Betting on the Wedding, an interactive app that lets guests make predictions by answering premade or custom questions.

What The Times Covered

The article walked through how the experience actually plays out on a wedding day. Guests monitor the status of their bets on their phones via a live leaderboard throughout the wedding. At the end of the event, everyone gets a notification letting them know how they performed and, if applicable, whom they may owe money to.

"We've become somewhat of a household name at this point, as it relates to wedding entertainment," Greg said.

The Times also spoke with wedding planners seeing the same shift. Cassie Horrell, a wedding planner in Pittsburgh, has seen a rise in the number of weddings featuring prop bets over the past year, with three of her client couples integrating a betting activity into their celebrations. She described the trend as part of a broader move toward more guest-centric experiences.

Why This Trend Is Growing

Couples are rethinking what a reception should feel like. Instead of a long stretch of downtime between dinner and dancing, a prediction pool gives every guest something to talk about, react to, and follow all night. It works across tables and generations, it pulls in the people who would otherwise sit out the dance floor, and it costs a fraction of most entertainment line items.

That is the same thing we hear from couples every week:

• It gives guests who do not know each other an instant conversation starter.
• It turns quiet moments in the timeline into shared moments.
• It gets grandparents, groomsmen, and coworkers into the same game.
• It creates stories people repeat long after the wedding weekend.

Thank You

We are so honored to have been written up in The New York Times. What began as a fun tradition with friends nearly a decade ago has grown into more than 25,000 wedding pools created with the app. We are incredibly grateful to everyone who has supported us, shared the idea, and made Betting on the Wedding part of their wedding weekends.

If you want to see what all of it looks like, you can start your own wedding pool for a one-time fee of $49.99. Guests join free from any phone browser, no download required.

Greg + Stacy