Soccer betting methodology: how every play is graded
By George Boyle · Updated
Every play on this site is a real wager, posted before the event and settled against the official result. This page is the contract: what gets counted, how it gets counted, and what the published number does and does not mean. The rules that decide which plays fire are ours and stay ours — what you can hold us to is the ledger, and the ledger is open.
What a play is
A play is a single wager at a single price for a stated stake. It is written down the moment it fires, with the market, the number, the price and the book — and it is never edited afterwards. If the line moves in our favour ten minutes later, the ledger still shows the price we actually took.
Stakes are in units, not currency, so a record is readable without knowing anyone's bankroll. One unit is one unit; a 0.5u play is half the conviction of a 1u play. Units differ in size between sports, which is why a combined curve is labelled as such rather than pretending every sport is on one scale.
How a play is settled
- Won / Lost — graded against the final result from the sport's results source (named below), not from a book's screen.
- Push — the result lands exactly on the number. Stake returned, counted in the record, excluded from win rate.
- Void — the event or the market did not happen. What counts as that differs by sport, and the exact rules are below. Removed from the record entirely rather than scored as a win or a loss.
- Open — posted, not yet resolved. Shown separately and never counted toward ROI until it settles.
Profit is the price we recorded, at the stake we recorded. Nothing is re-priced after the fact, and no play is removed because it lost.
How soccer plays settle
Results. Final scores from our match results feed, read no earlier than about two hours after kickoff so a live score is never taken for a final one.
Markets graded. Three-way match result (home win, draw or away win).
- No pushes.
- A three-way result wins or loses; there is no push.
- No result.
- A match with no final score seven days after its kickoff (abandoned, or postponed with no date) is void.
What the record covers
Soccer's public record covers every staked play on a game dated October 30, 2026 or later and runs to today. Every staked play since then is in it — winners, losers and the stretches where nothing worked. There is no “since we changed the model” reset hiding behind the number, and there is no second, better set of picks somewhere else.
Research that has never been staked does not appear in the record at all. When a system is being tested without money behind it, its plays are kept out of the ledger rather than blended in.
What we don't publish
The selection rules — what the models measure, the thresholds a play has to clear, how stakes are sized — are not on this site. They are the work, and publishing them would both give it away and move the very prices the plays depend on.
That is a real limit on what you can verify from the outside, and we would rather say so than dress it up. What is verifiable is everything downstream: the plays are posted before the event, the prices are the ones we took, the grading is against official results, and nothing is quietly deleted. Judge it on the ledger.
Nothing on this site is betting advice, and no result here should be read as a prediction of a future one. Bet only what you can afford to lose. If gambling stops being fun, help is available at 1-800-GAMBLER.