Tools

Did you beat the closing line?

The result of one bet tells you almost nothing. The price you got against the price the market closed at tells you whether the bet was any good, before the ball is even thrown.

Price you tookClosing price

Your break-even win rate52.4%

Closing break-even win rate56.5%

Closing line value+4.14pp

You beat the close, clearly.Your number needed you to win 4.14 percentage points less often than the closing number did. Over a season that gap is the whole margin.

What closing line value actually measures

Every price implies a win rate you need just to break even. If you took -110 and the market closed at -130, your number needed you to win about 5 percentage points less often than the final number did. You got a better price than the market's last word, and that gap is closing line value.

It matters because it is the one measure of a bet that does not depend on the result. A bet can lose and still have been a good bet; a bet can win and still have been a bad price. Over a season, the bettor who keeps beating the close is the one who ends up ahead, because the closing line is the market's sharpest estimate of what was going to happen.

How to use this

Put the price you actually got in the first field and the price the game closed at in the second. Positive closing line value means you beat the close. Around zero means you got the same number the market settled on. Negative means the market had a better price than you did by the time it shut.

One bet proves nothing either way. Run it across twenty or thirty bets and the pattern is the honest read on whether your process is finding value or just finding action.

Why this one is manual, and the app's version is not

Big Mike's board stores its own closing line for every game it prices, so inside the app every bet you place is graded against the close automatically, with no typing at all. This page is manual on purpose: it works for any bet at any book on any game, including the ones our board never covered, and an honest empty field beats a lookup that quietly returns nothing.

Common questions

Is beating the closing line the same as winning?

No, and that is the point. Closing line value measures the quality of the price you got, not the outcome of the game. You can beat the close and lose the bet. Over a large enough sample, consistently beating the close is the strongest signal that the wins are coming.

What counts as good closing line value?

Consistently positive is what matters far more than any single figure. Beating the close by a point or two per bet, sustained across a season, is a serious edge. A single bet at plus five points is mostly noise.

Where do I find the closing price?

Most sportsbooks show the final pregame number in their results or bet history. Use the closing price at the book you actually bet, or the best number available at kickoff if you are measuring how well you shopped.

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