Closing line value (CLV)
Whether a pick was taken at a better price than the market settled on before kickoff.
The closing line is the final price before an event starts, after every opinion and every piece of news has been absorbed. It is the market's most accurate estimate, and it is very hard to beat.
A pick has positive closing line value when the price it was taken at is longer than the closing price — you got 2.10 on something the market ended up pricing at 1.95. Over enough picks, consistently beating the close is the strongest available evidence that a tipster is finding real edge rather than getting lucky, because it does not depend on results at all.
The useful statistic is the beat rate: the share of picks taken at a better price than the close. Chance alone puts it at 50%. What matters is not whether a tipster is above 50%, but whether they are above it by more than their sample can explain — which is why every beat rate on this site is reported with a 95% interval.
Every figure above is computed from the same corpus as the free-tips study, using the collection and settlement steps set out in the methodology. The individual records behind it are at tipster records.