Alan and Karen Miller’s first dance was a win-or-lose moment for many of their wedding guests.
As the couple glided across the floor during their reception in New Rochelle, N.Y., last year, attendees kept track of the chosen artist and the length of the dance. Earlier in the night, they had noted their guesses on prop bet sheets.
Proposition, or prop, bets are usually tied to sporting events. Users place wagers on specific details that aren’t necessarily correlated with a game’s outcome, like points scored by certain players. Now, these bets have entered the world of weddings.
More couples have been integrating betting into their celebrations in recent years through digital apps or printed cards. While the Millers, who live in New York City, aren’t avid sports bettors or gamblers themselves, they wanted to make their June 2025 celebration more interactive and distinctive for their 175 guests.
“I’ve been to many New York and New Jersey weddings, and sometimes I feel like for cocktail hour, it kind of has a little bit of a lull, even though there’s a lot of good food,” said Karen, 38. “We wanted to make sure our guests had an activity that a lot of people could partake in.”
She bought a prop bet template from Etsy and customized it on the graphic design platform Canva. Among the questions on the couple’s prop bet sheet: Who will give the longest toast? Will the couple cry during the speeches? How many outfits will the bride wear on the wedding day?
After collecting the cards from about 60 guests at the end of the night, the Millers tracked the responses in a Google document, sharing the correct and the most popular answers with their guests on social media. The overall winner received a $20 Amazon gift card.
Julia Drachenberg, a wedding planner in Kelowna, British Columbia, said she noticed the betting trend starting to take off last year, and she was not surprised. Guests’ experiences often center on watching brides and grooms complete a number of time-honored traditions, she said, and prop bets allow them to use their personal knowledge of a couple.
“If the groom’s known to be an emotional man, it’s fun to bet on how early in the day he’s going to cry,” Drachenberg said. “I think it engages them a bit more in the day.”
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 said. “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 this pastime into a business and developed Betting on the Wedding, an interactive app that allows guests to make predictions by answering premade or custom questions.
The Stahls said that more than 25,000 couples so far had created a betting pool using their app, which costs a one-time fee of $49.99.
Guests can monitor the status of their bets on their phones via a live leaderboard throughout the wedding. At the end of the event, the app sends a notification to all participants 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, adding that the business has seen triple-digit year-over-year revenue growth.
Over the past year, Cassie Horrell, a wedding planner in Pittsburgh, has seen a rise in the number of weddings featuring prop bets. Three of her client couples have integrated a betting activity into their celebrations.
Like Drachenberg, Horrell said she saw the rise of wedding prop bets as a move toward more guest-centric experiences.
Betting activities can sometimes become a multiday experience. At Peyton and Olivia Holloway’s May 2025 wedding in Shorter, Ala., the couple, who live in Montgomery, started distributing prop bet cards to guests at their rehearsal dinner.
Peyton, 24, the tech support manager for the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office, created the cards himself. “I had been looking for something to do at the wedding that not many people had done, like something to stand out,” he said, adding, “I put random odds on there that I thought made sense at the time, and we just rolled with it.” His bets included whether a certain number of Taylor Swift songs would be played throughout the day and the length of their first kiss.
The bar for the kiss was set at 6.5 seconds. To the delight of the groom’s brother, the couple came in just under. He had made the right bet.
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