The timing is no accident. Polymarket just got the nod from regulators to re-enter the US, and PredictIt continues chugging along with its more academic flavor of political markets. Even Underdog, better known for fantasy contests, announced a sports prediction market with Crypto.com. Kalshi’s touchdown props look less like innovation and more like keeping pace in a league suddenly crowded with rivals.

Polymarket has been given the green light to go live in the USA by the @CFTC.

Credit to the Commission and Staff for their impressive work. This process has been accomplished in record timing.

Stay tuned https://t.co/NVziTixpqO

— Shayne Coplan (@shayne_coplan) September 3, 2025

Self-certification made the move possible, that lovely process where an exchange essentially tells the CFTC “we’re doing this unless you stop us” and then waits to see if anyone in Washington is awake enough to care. No objection yet, which means betting on Deebo Samuel finding the end zone is officially a regulated activity in America.

Not content with touchdowns, Kalshi also filed to self-certify parlays and multi-leg bets this week. That would let users mash together multiple outcomes into a single wager, moving one step closer to the state-regulated sportsbooks it insists it isn’t copying.

Polymarket, never shy about leaning on its community, took the same idea to Discord. Traders are now invited to submit parlay combinations of two to six existing markets. The top three to five ideas get put up for a quick vote twice a week, with winning suggestions actually listed on the site.

Think of it as crowdsourced gambling innovation, or possibly just a way to outsource product development to the same people who think betting on rainfall totals is an investment strategy.

So Week 1 of the NFL season doubles as Week 1 of the prediction market parlay wars. Kalshi is pushing touchdown props, Polymarket is dangling Discord votes, and the CFTC continues to play the role of slightly bemused chaperone.

And while Kalshi was busy with touchdowns, Polymarket found itself caught up in the far more important matter of the Pentagon Pizza Index. After Trump’s Oval Office announcement and his surprise decision to rebrand the Pentagon as the Department of War, speculation bubbled up that late-night pizza orders around the Pentagon were spiking.

What’s on this week’s prediction markets

Kalshi

Kalshi spent the first week trying to wedge itself into the national sports conversation without technically offering anything you could put money on. When Eagles defensive tackle Jalen Carter was tossed before the first snap for apparently spitting on Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott, Kalshi’s social feeds lit up with commentary.

No market, no bets, just a steady drip of viral-adjacent content. The effect was something like your accountant trying to crack jokes at the bar. Technically fine, but you can tell what they really want is for someone to say “hey, maybe you should run a line on that.”

Did Dak spit at Jalen Carter first??? pic.twitter.com/B9tVwvdbTl

— Kalshi Football (@KalshiFB) September 5, 2025

Where Kalshi had no hesitation was in politics. Ahead of Donald Trump’s Oval Office announcement on September 3, the exchange posted a blockbuster $536,807 in volume on the question “What will Trump say during the Announcement in the Oval Office originally scheduled for 2:00 pm ET?”

Kalshi traders bet heavily on Trump’s Oval Office announcement, with markets predicting mentions of Biden, Putin, and drugs. Credit: Kalshi

Around 75% of bettors correctly predicted that he’d mention Joe Biden, while 74% guessed he would rename the Pentagon the “Department of War.” He did exactly that, giving a rare moment where both Kalshi’s bettors and Trump himself delivered as advertised.

Trump is expected to make an announcement in 5 minutes

Our traders forecast Trump will say:
• “Biden” 75%
• “Department of war” 74%
• “Border” 66%
• “Russia” 63%
• “Ukraine” 56%
• “Emergency” 53%
• “Putin” 48%
• “Hoax” 43%
• “Maduro” 38%
• “Newsom” 28%

— Kalshi (@Kalshi) September 2, 2025

As for the industry’s own trash talk, that happened on social media, where Polymarket’s William LeGate accused Kalshi’s CEO of directing staff to “copy everything Polymarket does… our moat is regulatory capture.”

When I joined Kalshi a year ago today, Tarek made their mission clear: “copy everything Polymarket does… our moat is regulatory capture.”

Today, that moat no longer exists.

I couldn’t be more proud of my decision to join Polymarket — why copy the best when you can build it? https://t.co/W9jrfY5S1e

— LeGate (@williamlegate) September 3, 2025

Kalshi affiliates promptly called the claim misinformation. It’s a fight unlikely to move markets, but it does provide the spectacle of prediction exchanges wagering credibility in real time, one subtweet at a time.

“To boast of battle and then retreat is the mark of a hollow warrior.” – Sun Tzu

Will blocked me after posting blatant misinformation about @Kalshi (insulting to our hardworking team), + then hid my reply that called him out for lacking backbone.

Streisand effect William pic.twitter.com/m2qGFU6rH2

— Allan Maman (@allanmaman) September 4, 2025

Polymarket

Polymarket has been busy this week, though not with pizza. The so-called Pizza Index, a half-serious half-conspiratorial measure of national security tensions based on late-night orders to Pentagon-adjacent pizza joints, spiked in chatter after Trump’s Department of War rebrand.

The idea is if generals are stuck in the basement eating pepperoni at 2 a.m., something big is about to happen. According to the Pentagon Pizza Index site, which yes, really exists, things remain calm. No extra-large mushroom pies on the ledger, no missile strikes on the horizon.

Confusingly, Polymarket itself does not offer an actual wager on pizza deliveries, though the Pizza Index site helpfully slaps a Polymarket plug-in on the page anyway. It is either synergy or sabotage, depending on whether you believe mozzarella is a leading indicator.

Polymarket shows only a 6% chance Trump leaves office in 2025, despite more than $1.1 million in wagers. Credit: Polymarket

Where the action actually sits is in Trump’s political survival. Polymarket’s traders have already shoveled $1,106,191 into markets on whether he will resign by the end of this year. The odds sit at a measly 6%. The chance he bows out next year clocks in at 5%. The best Trump exit line available gives him a 10% shot of being gone by December 31, 2026, which in the world of prediction markets qualifies as optimistic.

Meanwhile, out the door at the CFTC, Commissioner Kristin Johnson took a parting swipe at her colleagues, lamenting that prediction markets have “too few guardrails and too little visibility.”

A fair point, though one suspects most bettors prefer it that way. After all, guardrails keep cars on the road, but they also make it harder to veer into oncoming traffic for fun.

Featured image: Canva / Grok

The post Trump announcement stirs market chatter as Pentagon Pizza Index stays flat appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Patsy Grimaldi, a restaurateur whose coal-oven pizzeria in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge won new fans for New York City’s oldest pizza style with carefully made pies that helped start a national movement toward artisan pizza, died on Feb. 13 in Queens. He was 93.

His nephew Frederick Grimaldi confirmed the death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Queens hospital.

Mr. Grimaldi began selling pies in 1990 under the name Patsy’s. In those days, legal skirmishes periodically disturbed the city’s pizza landscape, and it wasn’t long before threatening letters from the lawyers of another Patsy’s led him to rename the place Patsy Grimaldi’s, then simply Grimaldi’s. Many years later, he reopened his restaurant with a name that pays tribute to his mother. Today that sign reads Juliana’s Pizza.

Under any name, Mr. Grimaldi’s pizzerias attracted long lines of diners outside, on Old Fulton Street, who were hungry for house-roasted peppers, white pools of fresh mozzarella and tender, delicate crusts baked in a matter of minutes by a scorching pile of anthracite coal.

Like the cooks he trained, Mr. Grimaldi hewed to the techniques he had learned in his early teens working at Patsy’s Pizzeria in East Harlem, owned by his uncle Pasquale Lancieri. Mr. Lancieri was one of a small fraternity of immigrants from Naples, including the founders of Totonno’s Pizzeria Napolitana in Brooklyn and John’s of Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, who introduced New Yorkers to pizza in the early 20th century.

Mr. Grimaldi reached back to those origins when, after a long career as a waiter, he opened a place of his own with a newly built coal oven. At the same time, the minute attention he brought to his craft — picking up fennel sausage at a pork store in Queens every morning, for instance, while other pizzerias were buying theirs from big distributors — anticipated the legions of ingredient-focused pizzaioli who would follow him.

“It was the first artisan-style pizza” in the city, Anthony Mangieri, the owner of Una Pizza Napoletana in Lower Manhattan, said in an interview.

“He was really the first place that opened up that had that old-school connection but was thinking a little further ahead, a little more food-centric,” he said.

Patsy Frederick Grimaldi was born on Aug. 3, 1931, in the Bronx to Federico and Maria Juliana (Lancieri) Grimaldi, immigrants from southern Italy. His father, a music teacher and barber, died when Patsy was 12. To help support his mother and five siblings, Patsy worked at his uncle’s pizzeria, first as a busboy, then as an apprentice at the coal oven and eventually as a waiter in the dining room. Apart from a brief leave in the early 1950s to serve in the Army, he stayed until 1974.

Patsy’s Pizzeria kept late hours in those days, and Mr. Grimaldi grew adept at taking care of entertainers, mobsters, off-duty chefs and other creatures of the night, including Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Rodney Dangerfield, Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra.

The bond he formed with Mr. Sinatra lasted for decades. Mr. Grimaldi personally made deliveries from Patsy’s — two large sausage pies — when Mr. Sinatra stayed in his suite at the Waldorf Astoria. In 1953, they ran into each other in Hawaii, where Mr. Sinatra was filming “From Here to Eternity.”

“What are you doing here?” the singer asked the waiter. Mr. Grimaldi had been sent by the military to play bugle in an Army band.

Mr. Grimaldi met his wife-to-be, Carol, at a New York nightclub and took her to Patsy’s Pizzeria on their first date. They married in 1971.

A short time later, Mr. Grimaldi left Patsy’s to wait tables at a series of restaurants, including the Copacabana and the jazz club Jimmy Ryan’s. He was 57 and working at a Brooklyn waterfront cafe when he noticed an abandoned hardware store on Old Fulton Street with a “for rent” sign in the window and a pay phone bolted to a wall nearby. He picked up the phone and dialed the number. Not long after, he was showing off the nuanced, elemental pleasures of coal-fired pizza to people who had never tried it.

Matthew Grogan, an investment banker, ate at Patsy’s just a few weeks after it had opened. Until that moment, he thought he knew what good pizza was.

“I said, ‘I’ve been living a fraud all these years. This is the greatest food I’ve ever had,’” he recalled in an interview. (He later founded Juliana’s with the Grimaldis.)

Others seemed to agree, including critics, restaurant guide writers and customers. Some of them were well known, like Warren Beatty, who brought Annette Bening, his wife. (“So, are you in the movies, too?” Mrs. Grimaldi asked her.) Others were obscure until Mr. Grimaldi decided that they resembled someone famous. “Mel Gibson’s here tonight!” he would call out. Or: “Look, it’s Marisa Tomei!” He was more discreet when the actual Marisa Tomei walked in.

According to an unpublished history that Mrs. Grimaldi wrote, when the mob boss John Gotti was on trial in 1992 at the federal courthouse in Downtown Brooklyn, his lawyers became frequent takeout customers.

“We would wrap each slice in foil and they would put it in their attaché cases so that John would be able to have our pizza for lunch,” she wrote.

In 1998, the Grimaldis decided to sell the pizzeria to Frank Ciolli and try their hand at retirement. It didn’t last. Neither did their relationship with Mr. Ciolli, who opened a string of Grimaldi’s around the country that they believed failed to uphold the standards they had set in Brooklyn. When they learned that their old restaurant was being evicted, they snapped up the lease.

Mr. Ciolli, who moved Grimaldi’s to the building next door, sued to stop them from reopening. Mr. and Mrs. Grimaldi, he claimed in an affidavit, were trying to “steal back the very business they earlier sold to me.”

A truce was eventually reached. These days the lines outside Juliana’s are often indistinguishable from the lines outside Grimaldi’s.

Mr. Grimaldi, who lived in Queens, is survived by his sister, Esther Massa; a daughter, Victoria Strickland; and a grandson. His wife died in 2014. A son, Pat, died in 2018.

An alcove at Juliana’s holds a small Sinatra shrine. The jukebox at its forerunner, Patsy’s (a.k.a. Patsy Grimaldi’s a.k.a. Grimaldi’s), was stocked with Sinatra records, interspersed with a few by Dean Martin. Mr. Grimaldi maintained a strict no-delivery policy with one exception: for Mr. Sinatra.

The post Patsy Grimaldi, Whose Name Became Synonymous With Pizza, Dies at 93 appeared first on Our Story Insight.