Betting research
The Bozo Cave
Tools for doing the work yourself: what a player has actually done against a number, what a price really implies once the vig is stripped out, and whether an angle survives contact with out-of-sample data.
Pick a game. You get the spread and total in plain English, then every player prop the book is offering, sorted by how strongly that player's own history disagrees with the number.
If you have never bet before, read this bit
A sportsbook does not offer you an even-money coin flip. The standard price is −110, which means you risk $110 to win $100. Because of that, you do not need to win half your bets to break even — you need to win 52.4%. Everything on this page is measured against that number, because it is the only bar that matters.
The three words you will see everywhere
- The line
- The number you are betting over or under — 232.5 passing yards, or a team favoured by 6.5 points. Books set it where they expect roughly half the money on each side.
- The vig (or hold)
- The book's cut, built into the price. On a typical game it is 4–5%. It is why a coin-flip bet is a losing bet, and why "I went 50–50 this week" means you lost money.
- Hit rate
- How often something has actually happened. "Cleared it 8 of 12" is a hit rate of 67%. The catch is in the next section.
Why we never show a hit rate on its own
If a player has gone over his receiving-yards line in 8 of his last 12 games, that is 67% — which looks like a big edge. But 12 games is tiny. Flip a fair coin 12 times and it will come up heads 8 times about one run in six. The honest statement is "somewhere between 39% and 86%", and that range includes the 52.4% you need.
So every rate here comes with that range, and we only call something a lean when even the pessimistic end of the range still beats the price. That is a hard test. Most props fail it. That is the correct answer, and a site that told you otherwise would be selling you something.
What the colours mean
- Strong lean History clears the price comfortably, even read cautiously. Rare.
- Lean History clears the price, but not by much. Worth a look.
- Coin flip Could go either way once you account for the small sample. Most props land here.
- Too few games Not enough history to say anything at all.
How to actually use this
- Open Games and pick the game you care about.
- Read the top box — it tells you in words what the market thinks will happen.
- Scroll the prop table. It is already sorted with the strongest disagreements first.
- Click any prop to see the full history: recent form, how he has done against this opponent, and the spread of his results.
- Check the number against your book. Ours come from ESPN and yours may differ — a half-point matters.
The part most sites leave out
I tested 72 betting angles against 5,215 games of real closing lines. None of them beat the market once you correct for how many things were tried. Spreads and totals are close to unbeatable. Player props are softer — that is why this page leads with them — but even there, most of the time the honest answer is "no edge". The full working is in Reality Check.
None of this is a recommendation to place a bet. It is a calculator and a history book. If you are not enjoying it, stop.
Look up any player yourself. Pick a market and a player, type the number you are being offered, and see how often he has actually cleared it — overall, lately, and against this opponent. Enter the price too and it will tell you what the book needs you to hit.
This week's lines with the vig removed, so you can see the market's actual opinion and what the book is charging for it. The hold is the house edge baked into that game.
| Game | Spread | Total | Moneyline | No-vig win prob. | Hold |
|---|
No-vig probability is each side's implied chance once the overround is normalised away. It is the market's honest estimate — beating it means disagreeing with everyone who has money on the game, which is possible but is the bar.
Build an angle and test it on every regular-season game since 2007. Results come with a confidence interval, an out-of-sample split, and a count of how many angles you have tried this session — because that count is what decides whether a good-looking number means anything.
The research this page is built on, so you can check it rather than take my word for it. Everything below is computed from the same 5,215 games the Backtest Lab uses.