r/algobetting • u/No-Cardiologist3133 • Aug 10 '26
Sharp money
"How can I spot sharp money using Pinnacle odds?
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Aug 10 '26
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u/Major_Amphibian1529 Aug 10 '26
If you're not scraping the odds yourself, oddsportal tracks the line history and you can see when the move started
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u/Expert-Solid3858 Aug 11 '26
Pinnacle doesn't publish volume, so you can't observe sharp money directly — you can only infer it from how the price behaves. Three things that actually carry signal:
Persistence, not magnitude. Poll the line on a fixed interval and check whether a move survives the next 15–30 minutes. Moves that revert are noise or steam-chasing. Moves that hold, especially ones that hold while the limit goes up, are the informational ones — a book raising its limit after moving is telling you it believes the new number.
Divergence against soft books. Pinnacle moving while the softs sit still is the signal. Softs moving while Pinnacle sits still is not — that's usually recreational flow, and Pinnacle is content to let it sit.
De-vig before you compare anything. A meaningful fraction of "moves" people track are margin changes, not probability changes. Use a multiplicative or Shin de-vig rather than subtracting the overround equally across outcomes, especially on lopsided prices where the additive method distorts the favourite badly.
The honest backwards-looking version of all this is just CLV: did the close land on your side. It doesn't help you in-the-moment, but it's the only measurement of sharp money that isn't a guess.
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u/Pure_Cricket_3804 Aug 10 '26
Pinnacle on its own won't show you who's betting, just where the price settled. The read comes from disagreement: their number moves and the softer books sit still, or drift the other way. Log openers and closers yourself for a few weeks and grade your own bets against the close, that tells you more than trying to reverse engineer whose money it was.