How a Championship Board Prices a Field, With New York in Three Places

A championship board in one paragraph

A title market is a field, not a question. The exchange writes one yes-or-no contract for every club that could win, files them under a single event, and marks the event mutually exclusive, which means exactly one of those contracts resolves Yes and every other one resolves No. The 2027 professional football champion event carries a contract for each of the thirty-two clubs, the basketball equivalent carries thirty, the hockey one carries thirty-two, and the Eastern Conference basketball event carries the fifteen clubs eligible to win it. The wording is deliberately repetitive: if this club wins the title, the market resolves to Yes, once per club, with only the name changing. That single design decision is what makes the whole board readable as one distribution rather than as several dozen unrelated markets.

How a field prices step by step

1. Treat the board as one payout being divided. Because exactly one contract can pay, the Yes prices across the field describe how the market splits a single outcome among every club in it. Say a leader trades at 20%, the next four at 12, 10, 8 and 7%, and the long end of the field at 1% or under. The whole board still has one title to give away, and the ordering is the claim, not any one number in isolation.

2. Expect the field to add to slightly more than the whole. The sum across a full board is usually above the payout rather than exactly on it. The excess is the gap between what buyers will pay and sellers will take across dozens of separate order books, and it widens on the thin contracts at the bottom of the field where almost nothing has traded. A board that adds to more than one payout is not asserting that the season has two champions.

3. Read New York as a group of entries, not as one. This is where these boards behave differently for a reader here than they would anywhere else. The 2027 football title board carries the Bills, who play in Orchard Park, New York, alongside the Giants and the Jets, who carry New York identity and play their home games in East Rutherford, New Jersey, and it names the last two as New York G and New York J. The hockey board carries the Sabres, the Islanders and the Rangers. The basketball board carries the Knicks and the Nets. On each of them the New York entries are competing claims on the same single payout, so they cannot rise together on the strength of the same result.

4. Know that a club can settle No before the final is played. Elimination ends a contract. Polymarket resolves a club to No at the point it becomes impossible for that club to win under the league's rules, and the conference boards do the same the moment a club is out of the playoffs. A New York contract can therefore be finished in a week that the board itself keeps trading, and the price of the remaining field redistributes without a title having been decided.

5. Find the settlement source, which is the league. These events do not settle on a wire report alone. The basketball events name the governing league at nba.com; the professional football title event lists the Associated Press, ESPN and Fox Sports; the hockey and baseball boards take official information from the National Hockey League and Major League Baseball, with a consensus of credible reporting available only as a fallback. On Kalshi's football event, settlement follows about five minutes after the result is called.

6. Read the Other outcome and the backstop date. A field has to describe what happens when nobody wins. Polymarket's boards resolve to Other if the event is cancelled, postponed past a stated cutoff, or produces no declared champion inside the window; the conference football board sets that cutoff at March 31, 2027. Kalshi handles the same risk with a long backstop expiration instead, and the basketball title contracts carry one dated July 30, 2029 behind an expected expiration of July 31, 2027.

7. Count the exchanges on the board before you read its order. A field priced by two exchanges gives two independent orderings to compare against each other. A field priced by one gives a single book its view of thirty or sixteen clubs at once, with nothing to check it against. The 2026 WNBA title board is the New York case: Polymarket is the only exchange pricing it, and by September 4, 2026 six of its sixteen listed contracts had already closed at nothing.

Where New York readers stand

Whether a person in New York can reach either exchange quoting these boards is a question of what has been filed and what has been ordered, and this guide neither answers it nor forms a view on any venue. The state's own record on that, with the date on each part of it, is on the legal status page, which belongs alongside any board here. This guide is not legal advice and not financial advice.

Common misreadings

A club at the bottom of the board is a No contract. It is a Yes contract on an outcome the market considers remote, which is a different object. The No side of that same contract is where the crowded claim sits, and on a thirty-two-club field most of the money is on No across almost the whole board by construction.

The title board and the conference board are the same question. They are two markets with two different winners. A club can win the Eastern Conference and lose the final: the conference contract pays in full and the title contract resolves at nothing. The conference events carry their own field sizes, their own dates and their own settlement lines, and the fifteen-club and sixteen-club conference boards close weeks before the title board does.

A club is finished when it looks finished. Only the league's rules finish it, and the exchanges write the trigger explicitly. Until elimination is arithmetic rather than opinion, the contract stays open and keeps a price, which is why a board in February still lists clubs whose seasons ended in October.

Two New York clubs at the same price are saying the same thing twice. They are two entries in one exclusive field, so their prices are claims that compete. Where a card on this site shows the New York clubs and their place among the whole field, the market page behind it carries every club on the board, and the place is only meaningful against that full count.

A conference contract is the title contract with a shorter wait. It is a different question with its own settlement line and its own date. The Eastern Conference basketball event expires on June 30, 2027 and the title event on July 31, 2027, so one of them is decided and paid out while the other is still trading on the clubs that survived it.

Related guides and markets

The boards themselves are the Super Bowl market page, the Stanley Cup market page, the NBA Finals market page, the World Series market page and the WNBA Finals market page, with the conference rounds at the AFC championship, the NFC championship, the NBA Eastern Conference and the NHL Eastern Conference market pages. The opposite shape, where several contracts on one club can all pay, is set out in the guide to how win total ladders settle.

This guide is not legal advice and not financial advice. It explains how a field of contracts is written and settled, and it recommends no club, no contract and no exchange.