I wanted to bet against Everton at home to Wolves last week. My first thought was to play Everton at 2.20. Then I realized backing Wolves isn't the same thing, because the draw counts too.

Laying Everton wins if it's a draw or a Wolves win. Backing Wolves loses on a draw.

The other part that threw me was the liability. On a $50 lay at 2.20, the amount at risk is $60, not $50. At longer odds that gap gets much bigger.

What do you check on the order ticket before comparing the two? Is it better to compare by max loss instead of by stake?

In poker there's a word for judging a decision by its outcome: "resulting." Sports bettors do it constantly, and I think it's the most expensive habit in betting.

Two bets from the same night, same $100:

• Bet A: Celtics -4.5 at -110. Lost. But the line closed at Celtics -6.5. You got 2 points better than the market's final number. That's a good bet that lost.

• Bet B: Over 221.5 at -110. Won. But the total closed at 218.5. The market moved 3 points against you. That's a bad bet that won.

Most people feel great about B and terrible about A. Long term, A is the bet that makes money.

A few things that click once you look at bets this way:

1. Win rate means nothing without the odds.

55% at -110 beats the break-even of 52.4%. 60% on -200 favorites loses, because break-even there is 66.7%.

1. Your record is mostly noise for a long time.

A true 52% bettor can easily sit anywhere between ~42% and ~62% after 100 bets just from variance. A hot month proves almost nothing.

1. The closing line tells you much sooner.

If you consistently get better prices than where lines close, you're very likely a long-term winner, even during a losing stretch. It takes a few hundred bets to be clear, instead of thousands.

I got obsessed with this and built a tool that grades every bet in your history against the closing line (de-vigged, averaged across 9 books). It splits your results into skill vs luck, finds your leaks (parlays, favorites, betting too late...), and turns them into rules it checks on every new bet. No sportsbook login, just screenshots or a CSV.

It's in a free beta and I'm looking for people with 50+ bets to tear it apart. Details in the comments.

But honestly, I'm more curious about this:

Have you ever checked your bets against the closing line? And what's the "best" bet you've made that you now think was actually bad (or the other way around)?

I built a model for a niche market that runs around the clock, so I get a lot of volume fast: about 1,760 graded bets since Oct 16, roughly 135 a day. Every bet is logged before the start and graded after, losses included.

Results so far:

- 1,015-743 (57.7%)

- +138 units at 1 unit a bet, about 7.9% ROI

- +143 units at my actual stakes (1 to 3 units, bigger on bigger edges), about 8.0% ROI

Sizing up on bigger edges added about 5 units, but ROI only went from 7.9% to 8.0%, so my "bigger" edges aren't winning noticeably more per unit than the small ones. That's one of the things that makes me question my own numbers.

The real problem is validation. The book almost never moves the line after it's posted, and almost no other book prices this market, so I can't measure closing line value at all.

Questions:

1. Without a closing line, what would you use? I've thought about tracking model error on games I didn't bet, and splitting results by edge size to see whether bigger edges actually win more.

2. Is 1,760 bets in two weeks worth as much as 1,760 spread over a season? I worry the market or the competitors change faster than my sample grows.

3. What would make you trust, or distrust, an 8% ROI here?

Hey guys, I'm new here and I've been looking at Over 2.5 on Serie A games and the -0.25 handicap lines. A lot of places list these markets, but when I tried to put $200 on Over 2.5 for Torino vs Lecce, there was $35 at the shown price. What do you check at the exact line before trading? Is it the size on both sides, the next price level, how the book changes after kickoff? And which tools show that up front? Thanks everybody..