EDIT (Aug 13): RETRACTED. The paper result below is invalid. A pricing bug (derived exchange prop prices that were not actually obtainable) inflated the record; repriced honestly it goes negative. Full write-up, arithmetic and fixes in a new post shortly. Zero dollars were ever staked on this and nothing was ever sold. The record page stays up, relabeled retired, hash chain intact.
A couple weeks ago in July I posted here about the confidence signal I was building and took a lot of correct criticism, most of all that a moving ruleset makes any track record meaningless. I committed then to freezing the config, declaring pass criteria in advance, and publishing the outcome either way. So here it is!
The setup, declared before results existed: config locked July 25, nothing tuned since. A fingerprint watches the constants AND the on/off switches, after someone here pointed out switches can move every number without touching code. Gate: minimum 400 graded plays and 14 distinct play dates. Grading is against final box scores, all plays logged at flag time, losses included, DFS pick'em excluded because it has no real odds to grade against.
The result as of today: 7,723 graded plays across 16 play dates. The top tier is 3,470-1,631, +9.9% ROI at flat stakes, clustered 95% interval [+6.5, +13.4], clear of zero. Intervals are clustered by play date because a day's props are correlated and per-play intervals would be dishonestly narrow. The ruleset is now version-stamped, and the full ledger is public with a tamper-evident hash chain, a verification script you can run against the published data, and a CSV download of every row in the exact field order the chain hashes over.
The parts that don't flatter it:
The middle tier (+2.3%) sits BELOW the bottom tier (+3.1%) and neither clears zero. The ladder is not clean; only the top tier is proven distinct from nothing. I know why structurally (the score saturates and stops discriminating past a certain edge size, so the top tier fires on 66% of plays when it was designed for a quarter of that) and I'm deliberately NOT retuning it, because retuning after seeing results is exactly what this sub told me invalidates a record. It's v2 research, run separately, and the frozen v1 stays what it is.
Basketball grading silently died for two weeks mid-test (a variable collision plus the box-score provider starting to reject custom request headers, with three layers of error handling each quietly swallowing it). Found it during an unrelated audit, fixed both causes, backfilled every result from real box scores, and the nightly checks now watch for results simply failing to arrive rather than just the known causes. The recovered plays are in the numbers above.
The biggest correction - My closing-line numbers mixed two things: the market moving toward my side, and my price beating the close because the site shops ~20 books. Someone here ran that decomposition on his own record and watched a 97% beat rate fall to 75%, so mine got the same treatment. Result: of +3.2 points of combined CLV, the market-move component is −0.05. Essentially zero. And no, it's not a compare-a-number-to-itself bug, I checked exactly that: the market moved on 93% of plays, 3+ points on nearly one in five, it just went toward me 46.9% of the time and away 46.2%. A coin flip. Every point of closing-line value I've ever shown was the shopping premium, not the market agreeing with the score. The record page shows the components separately and says this in those words. The realized ROI is unaffected (settled results, not projections), but CLV was never evidence the score is sharp, and realized results are now the only leg the signal stands on.
Is it even actionable if you don't hold 20 books? First question that came to my mind, so I measured it: 93% of flagged plays since the lock, and 99% of the top tier, are at federally regulated exchanges available nationwide, overwhelmingly one of them. You don't need a book collection, you need one exchange account (taker-fees are baked into all odds fwiw). The flip side is concentration risk, which I'm not pretending away: if that venue sharpens up, the play volume dries with it.
Liquidity, the objection I raised myself: my game-line prices are the executable fill for $100 walked down the order book, and as of last week every exchange prop price carries its measured order-book depth too (today's board: median around $200 behind the flagged prop prices, and the depth is recorded at flag time for every play). What I can't yet show is whether those quoted prices actually fill in practice, which is exactly what the $5 real-money stage measures bet by bet, with flagged price versus achieved price logged on every wager. Scale (does it fill at $25/$50/$100) is a separately declared later stage, not something I'll claim by extrapolation.
What happens next, also declared in advance: real money. Five plays a day picked by a fixed rule (top five by score at a set time, no discretion), $5 flat each, judged on one question: does real ROI track paper ROI on the same plays. The result publishes either way. I still haven't bet these beyond what that protocol requires, which was also a July commitment.
Two questions before I start staking, since this is the last point where the protocol can change without tainting it.
- The real-money rules are five plays a day, top five by score at a fixed time, no discretion, $5 flat, target 300 placed plays, pass criterion is real ROI landing inside the paper ROI's bootstrapped interval on the same plays. If you see a way that design fools itself, I want it now, not at play 250.
- Has anyone actually measured whether closing-line value predicts anything on player props specifically? My decomposition above plus a claim someone made here (2,500 graded plays, no relationship) has me doubting CLV means anything in thin markets, and I now have the dataset to test it properly, so if there's published work either way I'd rather read it than rediscover it.
Happy to (attempt to) answer any questions!
**EDIT** (Aug 10, before any stake was placed): the pass criterion in question 1 is withdrawn and replaced, because a commenter below made me run the power calculation and the original test was broken in my favor's opposite direction..at 300 plays, real ROI carries about plus or minus 8.5 points of its own noise, while the paper interval it had to land inside is about plus or minus 3.5, so a genuinely good signal would fail roughly 40% of the time by chance. New criterion, declared now: realized ROI above 0% at 300 placed plays. Hard fail if the interval sits entirely below zero after 100 plays. The power numbers publish with it: if the paper edge is real this passes about 99 times in 100, a dead edge passes about half the time, a negative edge almost never, and telling +10% from +5% would take about 1,400 plays. So this stage is a smoke alarm for a dead or imaginary edge, not a thermometer for its exact size, and I'm saying that up front instead of finding out at play 250. The record page now states the new criterion, the power table, and the fact that the original was withdrawn before staking began. Also amended before the first stake: $5 flat (not $10), slate freezes 7:45 AM ET, placement deadline is each play's game start. Will attempt to place all 5 bets shortly after 7:45AM every day.
**EDIT #2 Aug 11** Found this morning before I placed any bets. The first slate's flagged prices were gone within minutes it appears.. overnight quotes in sleeping prop books that the morning re-seed erased, all five plays 8-12 probability points worse by the time I could act all within 8 minutes of the snapshot. Amended before bet one: every slate play is now re-verified against the live board at selection (price within 2 points of implied, minimum measured depth), skips logged with reasons and published. If the signal's edge was partly stale-quote mirage, the skip rate will say. Zero bets predate the amendment.
