Paper bets

Bets suggested by the daily slate builder (value singles + a fun parlay + a longshot).

Knockout football is cagey (legs tighten when losing means going home): under 2.5 goals when the sim agrees (any positive edge). Hypothesis-tagged.

Law-derived (winless-run replicates in 4 sports): bet AGAINST any side whose opponent... no — whose own winless run is 4+ games, when priced under 2.8. Fade the drought.

Straight Elo value on MLB moneylines: bet either side when Elo win probability beats the best price by 4%.

Mean-reversion creative: fade sides whose Elo momentum is scorching (opponent momentum in top band) — the market overprices streaks. Expected to be humbled; that is the point of testing it.

Baseball is the highest-variance major sport (rating->win only +0.12) yet the public loves favorites. Back MLB underdogs priced 2.2-3.5 when our Elo edge is at worst -3%.

Anytime-scorer v2.1: involvement-first gates (forwards gi>=0.40/90, attacking mids gi>=0.50/90 — position-only banned Bellingham-class players the involvement rate wants; defenders stay out at 0/9), confirmed XI, price <= 4.5, full scorer model, edge >= 10%. Retested on the real graded window: rejects all five of v1's losers, admits nothing that lost. A/B twin of v1.

Market-structure play: when bookmakers DISAGREE hard on a price (cross-book spread > 8%), take the best available price on the side with any positive Elo edge — someone is wrong, take the generous one.

In-play fade-the-goal: when a goal goes in, back the CONCEDING side at the real live price if the conditioned posterior still shows >=10% edge. The bayes replay's best surviving policy (+11.7% ROI over 1,324 bets on the own-goal-corrected sample, 6/10 winning seasons vs +1.1% control). Placed by the watcher, max 2 per contest, savepoint-safe. The definitive grade is this live sample at real odds.

Simple 2-leg parlay of the day's PROVEN-class bets only (ko unders, ref-gated cards over, style-gated corners over — the classes that are 11-for-13 live). Two +EV legs compound edge multiplicatively; small flat stake because variance compounds too. Legs come from bets the proven strategies actually placed today.

The first player-level strategy: a gradient-boosted scorer model (rolling goals/shots per 90, starting rate, team attack vs opponent defence, confirmed lineups when available) prices every Kalshi anytime-goalscorer market and bets where its probability beats the fee-adjusted ask by 10%+. Settles from Kalshi's own results.

Tom's both-teams structure: when EACH side of one match has a qualifying prop_soa_v1 player, parlay the pair ($3). Mildly negatively correlated legs (one side dominating starves the other) — the trial measures whether the price makes up for it.

The referee signal finally bettable: card-happy ref (top tercile, >=3.52/game) -> back total cards OVER at the main line from the new odds feed. Settles from post-match team stats.

World Cup accumulator: combines today's two best singles actually placed by the WC strategies (wc_sim_value_v1 / wc_upset_hunter_v1 / wc_form_edge_v1 — every leg already passed its own gates) into one 2-leg parlay. Small stake, tournament-sized price.

Who's on the mound matters most in baseball. Bet an MLB moneyline side when its probable starter's season ERA is at least 1.00 better than the opponent's (mlb.starter_era_gap, signed to the bet side) AND our Elo sees any positive edge at the best live price. First strategy to use contest-scoped context metrics.

Promoted from the matrix tournament (won ALL 4 backtest seasons, worst season +$471): when the referee's card average is in the top tercile (>=3.52/game), the match tightens — back the DRAW blind. Model-free context bet; forward trial to survive multiple-comparisons doubt.

World Cup knockout chaos: longshots priced 4-10 where the sim still sees positive edge. Small stakes, big stories.

Score-or-assist singles with the context gates baked in from day one (graded WC window: naked SoA -60%, elite lane -51%, price 5+ 0-for-13 -> tails banned): goal involvement >= 0.40/90 over last 12 apps, price 2.0-4.5 only, expected starter, elo not against (within 50), and the keeper gate — only bet INTO a cold opposing keeper (team.keeper_form_v1 below pool median). Kalshi SoA settles via settle-kalshi-props.

The fun one: a $2 three-leg parlay of the day's highest-edge independent legs across all live strategies' candidates. Margin math says it should bleed; it exists to make the math visible.

Layer 3, the bet-maker: builds the best BASKET across everything priced (ballast/value/longshot buckets, one bet per contest, quarter-Kelly, model blended 50/50 with the market) and Monte Carlos each slate before betting. Historical replay verdict: with the current football model's edge it would have gone bust over 21 seasons ($1000 -> $0.76) — this forward trial tests whether the newer, humbler probabilities change that.

World Cup: back any 1x2 pick where the fixtures-sim beats the best live price by 5%+ AND the bookmakers disagree with each other by 4%+ on that price — tournament markets get confused, and confusion is where a model edge is most believable. The lower edge bar than wc_sim_value_v1 is paid for by the confusion gate.

World Cup: back any 1x2 selection where the Poisson fixtures-sim beats the best live price by 8%. Caveat honored: the sim runs hot on tournament data, hence the high bar. [2026-07-07: gap-filter gate mandatory — naked longshot gaps went 8W-49L in the cup retro and the gf twin vetoed them all.]

Half-cover dutch: back the sim's 1x2 pick (edge >= 5%) AND the draw, draw stake sized to refund HALF the outlay on a draw. The 21-season backtest (exp #203) found full cover overpays for insurance (median $898) while half-cover beats straight outright: median $1,060 vs $995, worst season $87 vs $17.

Staking A/B twin of wc_sim_value_v1: identical signal (Poisson sim beats best price by 8%) but sized by kelly_of_ruin — half-Kelly scaled by the posterior probability this bankroll's edge is real, from its own settled record. Measures the staking policy, not the signal. [2026-07-07: gap-filter gate mandatory — naked longshot gaps went 8W-49L in the cup retro and the gf twin vetoed them all.]

Mad-game mode, live: the whole $1000 game budget committed to ONE match. Plan: spray_and_pray — equal-revenue dutch with a +10% return target, the one-game-format champion of the 12-plan mad-game replay (exp #225: median $1,100, 75.6% hit rate, 0.4% bust vs tranche_ladder's $758/10.7%). By 12' the watcher covers the largest outcome set whose dutch return clears the target at real live prices, stakes ~1/price (small on longshots, big on favourites), and holds the unstaked remainder as the designed loss buffer. tranche_ladder remains available via bet_rule.plan. One contest per day.