Betting glossary

Definitions are easy to find. What is hard to find is what these numbers actually look like in the wild — so where the corpus can measure a term, this glossary reports the distribution across every tipster record we track rather than an assertion from a staking guide.

Measured terms

Each of these carries a distribution computed from the tracked corpus.

Strike rate
The share of a tipster's settled picks that won, ignoring the price they were taken at.
Yield
Profit as a percentage of everything staked — the number that says whether a tipster made money.
Closing line value (CLV)
Whether a pick was taken at a better price than the market settled on before kickoff.
Odds
The price a bet is taken at, and the single biggest driver of what a strike rate means.
Sample size
How many settled picks stand behind a figure — and how many it takes before the figure means anything.

Everything else

Closing line: The closing line is the market's last and best estimate, formed after all late money, team news and injury information has been absorbed. It is the benchmark a pick's price is measured against.
Edge: A bettor has edge when their assessment of an outcome's likelihood is more accurate than the price implies, by enough to overcome the bookmaker's margin. Edge is not the same as being right: a bet can lose and still have been the correct bet.
Expected value (EV): Expected value multiplies each outcome by its probability. A bet at 2.10 on something with a true 50% chance has an expected value of +5% per unit staked. Positive expected value is the only durable reason to place a bet; everything else is variance.
Overround (vig, juice): Add up 1 divided by each price in a market and the total will exceed 1. A two-way market priced at 1.91 and 1.91 sums to about 1.047, a 4.7% overround. That margin is the house's edge and the hurdle every bettor is clearing before they profit.
Staking plan: Level staking puts the same amount on every pick. Proportional plans scale the stake with confidence or with bankroll. A staking plan cannot turn a losing set of picks into a winning one; it changes the shape of the ride, not the destination.; Records here are computed at level stakes unless the source published its own stake, because level staking is the only assumption that does not flatter a tipster who happened to size their winners well.
Unit: Quoting results in units rather than money makes them comparable between bettors of very different means. One unit is conventionally 1% to 2% of a bankroll.
Bankroll: A bankroll is money that can be lost in full without affecting anything else. Its size determines what a unit is worth, and how much drawdown can be survived without being forced to stop.
Kelly criterion: Kelly maximises long-run growth by staking a fraction of bankroll equal to the edge divided by the odds minus one. It is optimal only when the edge is known exactly, which it never is, so most disciplined bettors use a half or a quarter of the Kelly stake to blunt the swings.
Drawdown: Even a profitable tipster spends much of their time below a previous high. Maximum drawdown is the worst of those falls, and it is the number that decides whether a bettor could actually have followed the tipster to the end rather than quitting in the middle of it.
Void (push): Voids happen when an event is abandoned, a handicap lands exactly on the line, or a market is cancelled. Because no stake was at risk, a void is counted as settled but excluded from win rate — treating it as a loss understates a tipster and treating it as a win flatters them.
Asian handicap: A -0.5 handicap is a straight win requirement; -1.5 requires a two-goal margin. Quarter lines such as -0.25 split the stake across two handicaps, which is why an Asian handicap bet can win half and push half.
Accumulator (parlay): Accumulators multiply the odds and multiply the margin with them: each leg carries the bookmaker's overround, so a five-fold pays a much larger share of its expected value to the house than five single bets would.
Tipster: The word covers everything from an individual posting free picks to an algorithm generating thousands a week to a paid subscription service. What they have in common is that their claims are almost never independently checked — which is the gap this site exists to close.