When a Prediction Ties: Push and Multi-Winner, Explained

For as long as PLLAY has settled pools, the design assumed a single winning option — one option matched what actually happened, and everyone who backed it split the pool. That assumption holds most of the time. It doesn't hold every time: a match can end with no option matching cleanly, or with more than one option matching at once. This month those two outcomes became a designed part of settlement, not a case someone had to work around by hand.

We call them push and multi-winner. A push is what happens when no option matched what actually occurred — every entry gets a full refund, no fees taken, and the pool is marked settled rather than cancelled, so it still shows up as a real, resolved pool rather than one that silently disappeared. It's also neutral: a push doesn't help or hurt anyone's accuracy record or streak, because nobody was actually right or wrong. A multi-winner is the opposite case — more than one option matched, and the backers of every matching option share the pool rather than one option taking all of it.

Underneath, a prediction now carries an outcome_kind alongside its original winning-option field, plus the full list of which options matched. The original field didn't go away — a database trigger keeps it populated automatically, so the fifteen other places in the codebase that already read it keep working unchanged. That was a deliberate constraint: this needed to be additive to the settlement engine, not a rewrite of it.

We shipped it in three stages, in order: the database core that defines what a push or multi-winner outcome actually is and how it settles, then the resolve flow so an admin or a creator can mark a pool as a push or a multi-winner in the first place, then the read side — the creator-leagues result view, the fan-app leaderboard, and the public result page — so a push or multi-winner outcome actually reads as one instead of showing up blank or mislabeled as a loss.

This version covers our dynamic pari-mutuel pools, which is where the vast majority of predictions run today. Arena, an automated push call from the vision-detection work, and multi-leg parlay predictions are deliberately out of scope for now — each of those needs its own design pass, and we'd rather ship the common case correctly than ship all of them at once and get one of them wrong.

The honest reason this took real design work, not just a database column: a refund that quietly doesn't move an accuracy record, and a shared payout that splits correctly across however many people called it right, both have to be exactly as trustworthy as a normal win — because from a fan's side, a tie is not a lesser outcome. It's just the outcome that actually happened.