The five-minute guide. No betting knowledge assumed.
A prediction machine for sports. It continuously ingests results and betting odds (football, baseball, basketball, tennis), computes hundreds of its own statistics, simulates upcoming games, and then bets fake money on its own theories to find out which ones actually work. No real money is ever staked.
Open any match (e.g. from the dashboard's next-24-hours list) and you'll see, per question (“Who wins?”, “3+ goals?”):
Golden rule: a good bet is never “who will win?” — it's “is this price too generous for the true probability?” You can profit betting on likely losers and lose betting on likely winners.
Each strategy is a theory with its own $1000 fake bankroll. Every day the machine checks upcoming games and lets each strategy bet automatically when its rule triggers. The Bets page is the live scoreboard — over months, surviving bankrolls are evidence, dead ones are lessons. Some are designed to fail on purpose (the placebo) to prove the machine isn't fooling itself.
| Strategy | Status | The theory |
|---|---|---|
| Draw family | dormant | The sweep survivor: back the DRAW when model edge > 10% in high-tempo matchups. Verdict window +12.6% on 324 unseen bets (upper bound). [BLOCKED: model 'gbm' needs a forward-serving job the executor doesn't have yet — review finding #12; was mislabeled 'armed'.] |
| Draw calm books | dormant | Sibling survivor: back the DRAW when edge > 15% and bookmaker margin is low. Verdict +4.5% on 429 unseen bets. [BLOCKED: model 'gbm' needs a forward-serving job the executor doesn't have yet — review finding #12; was mislabeled 'armed'.] |
| MLB dog variance | live | 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%. |
| Elo value MLB | live | Straight Elo value on MLB moneylines: bet either side when Elo win probability beats the best price by 4%. |
| Drought fade | live | 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. |
| Steam confusion | live | 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. |
| Fatigue fade NBA | armed | Law-derived (NBA congestion is real, r=-0.067): fade NBA teams playing their 4th+ game in 7 days against fresher opponents. |
| Hot hand fade | live | 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. |
| Chaos parlay | live | 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. |
| Placebo rain unders | dormant | CONTROL: bet football unders when heavy rain is forecast. Our own discovery says rain does NOT reduce goals — so this placebo SHOULD lose at the margin rate. If it wins long-term, our discovery engine has a bug. Science. [BLOCKED: model 'gbm' needs a forward-serving job the executor doesn't have yet — review finding #12; was mislabeled 'armed'.] |
| Cards closeness | dormant | Discovery-derived (closeness->fouls, r=+0.19 emergent): cards/fouls overs in evenly-matched games. Dormant until a live cards-odds feed exists. UPDATE 2026-07-03: referee identity alone swings P(4+ cards) from 33.6% to 54.0% (quartile split, n=21,870) — add match.ref_cards_avg regime when the odds feed exists. |
| WC sim value | live | 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.] |
| WC upset hunter | live | World Cup knockout chaos: longshots priced 4-10 where the sim still sees positive edge. Small stakes, big stories. |
| WC KO unders | live | Knockout football is cagey (legs tighten when losing means going home): under 2.5 goals when the sim agrees (any positive edge). Hypothesis-tagged. |
| Steam chaser | live | Line-movement study (78k selections, 20yr): big steam (4+ prob-pt moves) is the one bucket the close doesn't fully absorb (+2.3pts residual), concentrated in soft leagues (+5.9% EL2) and away sides (+6.4%). Hypothesis-grade (CI spans zero) — this forward trial is the judge. Bets any selection whose consensus implied prob rose 4+ pts across our own daily snapshots. |
| Portfolio | live | 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. |
| Pitcher edge | live | 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. |
| Prop scorer | live | 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. |
| Ref cards draw | live | 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. |
| Cards over ref | live | 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. |
| Corners style over | live | Two corner-hungry teams meet (style clash top tercile, >=11.4 combined corner averages) -> back total corners OVER at the main line. Model-free; the relational miner showed corners follow style and mismatch. |
| WC sim value kor | live | 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.] |
| Mls sim value | live | MLS forward trial: back any 1x2 selection where the fixtures sim beats the best price by 10%. Higher bar than WC — the sim is new to this league and MLS draws are notoriously frequent. |
| Dutch cover | live | 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. |
| Dd live | live | In-play double-down: when a pending pre-match 1x2 single is TRAILING at a poll and the conditioned model posterior still shows >=8% edge at the real live price, add one $10 bet on the same side. The one in-play behavior that beat its control in the 3,454-match bayes replay (+8.1% vs +2.5%, exp #206). Placed by the inplay watcher, not the executor; graded against REAL live odds. |
| Simple parlay | live | 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. |
| EPL mid dog | live | The tuning sweep's best honest cell, armed for 2026-27: EPL home mid-dogs (price 2.6-4.5) when the engine's edge >= 8% -> +18% ROI over 540 real-priced bets, era-stable (+15%/+12%/+10% across 05-10/17-21/22-26). Half-Kelly per the matrix law. HONEST CAVEAT: thresholds chosen in-sample; this live trial is the out-of-sample test. |
| EPL mid dog | live | v1 + the loss-pattern filters baked in: real favourite only (away rank <= 14), our dog not in the drop zone (home rank <= 17), home side alive (form >= 4 pts l5), and no Aug-Oct bets (early-season inputs are noise). Holdout 2016-26: +31.0% over 128 bets vs v1's +15.0% on the same seasons; filters do NOT travel to other leagues (-6.7%) — this is an EPL edge. A/B twin of v1, ~13 bets/season. |
| Prop scorer | live | 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. |
| Prop soa | live | 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. |
| Soa duo parlay | live | 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. |
| Fade goal live | live | 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. |
| Mad game live | live | 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. |
| Goal bets | live | Pre-match goal-market value: price total-goals (O/U 2.5) and BTTS off the Dixon-Coles score matrix built from each contest's stored sim lambdas (home/away-split, shrunk), bet where the book is soft by >=8%. Also surfaces the two likeliest correct scores. Placed by the goal-bets command, graded from the scoreline. Tom's goal-bets idea; the score matrix also feeds the half-time Bayesian re-bet (goal_bets_ht_v2). |
| Goal bets ht | live | Bayesian half-time re-bet on total goals: from ~40' the live score is data, so the score matrix conditions on it (remaining goals ~ Poisson on the remaining lambda share) and the final O/U 2.5 posterior updates exactly. If it beats the live over/under price by >=8%, back it. Placed by the in-play watcher at real live odds, one re-bet per contest. v2 of goal_bets_v1; debuts on the WC quarter-finals. |
| Goal bets late over | live | Late-overs goal variant: from 50' back OVER 2.5 only when the score-matrix posterior beats the live over price by >=8%. Top of the goal-replay family (exp: +11.6% ROI, 8/10 winning seasons over 1225 corpus bets) BUT on synthesised live lines where late-over longshots may be flattered by the vig model — this WC trial is the real test. Backing late UNDERS was a -20.7% trap in the same backtest, so this variant is overs-only. Watcher-placed, one bet per contest. |
| Away fav continental | live | edge_hunt finding (2026-07-09): back the AWAY side at short/even odds (<=2.6) in Serie A / Ligue 1 / Primeira. +3.0% ROI at consensus market price, +4.7% best-of-book over 3,366 bets (2015+). Survives a temporal train/test split, BEATS the closing line, positive in 13/14 recent seasons, holds at consensus (not a best-of-book artifact; ~3 books/game). Maps to the home-favouritism bias. CAVEATS: small edge (~3%); ~2012 regime change means exploitable-now not timeless; this live paper trial is the out-of-sample test. |
| WC form edge | live | 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. |
| WC keeper wall | live | World Cup club-form carryover: a keeper doesn't forget how to save when he swaps his club shirt for his country's. Back a team (1x2) when THEIR keeper's rolling save% — built from ALL his matches, club included — is hot (>=75%) and the OPPONENT'S keeper is leaky (<=68%), requiring only a non-negative sim edge so the keeper signal is the driver. NOTE: fires only once nations carry team.keeper_form values (needs AF starter data for national-team matches — the daily catchup is filling this); silent until then by design, never guessing. |
| WC parlay | live | 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. |
| Edge | How much better the model thinks a price is than the true odds. +5% edge means the payout is 5% too generous. Positive edge, repeated forever, is the only way to win. |
| De-vigged | Bookmaker prices always add up to more than 100% — the excess is their profit margin (the “vig”). De-vigging removes it to recover honest probabilities. |
| Moneyline | A simple “who wins” bet in 2-outcome sports (baseball, basketball). |
| Parlay | Several picks combined into one bet. All must win; the payouts multiply. Fun, and mathematically bad — each leg compounds the bookmaker's margin. |
| Backtest | Replaying history: would this strategy have made money betting real past odds? Done carefully — the model only ever sees data from before each bet. |
| Brier score | Accuracy of probability forecasts, lower = better. We always compare against the market's own Brier — beating it is rare and is the real trophy. |
| CLV | Closing-line value: did you get a better price than the final pre-game price? Consistently yes = you know something the market learns later. The earliest honest signal of skill. |
| Kalshi | A regulated prediction market we track as a bookmaker. Its displayed prices exclude trading fees, so we store fee-adjusted prices — what you'd really pay. |
| Paper bet | A bet recorded with fake money at real prices. All bets here are paper bets. |
Bookmakers price with margins of 2–6%, so a random bettor loses at exactly that rate — our backtests confirm it over 20 years of data. The machine's job isn't to promise profit; it's to measure everything, test every theory fairly, and never fool us. When something does beat the market (rare, small, fragile), the Lab will show it with the evidence attached.