The model. A Dixon-Coles fit over every Premier League match since 2019 — an attack and a defence rating for each side, home advantage, and a time decay so last month counts for more than last season. That gives one score matrix per fixture, and every market TAB prices comes off it: result, goals, both teams to score, corners, cards. Beside it runs a streak engine over 3,810 matches that asks whether a run is actually a run — each one carries the subject's own long-run baseline, an estimate shrunk toward it, and an exact p-value corrected for the hundreds of trends we test every round.
What a price can't see. Ratings only know results, so the brief adds the rest: who is injured or rotated and who takes the set pieces, the referee's card rate shrunk hard toward the league average, and the kickoff-hour weather forecast — the forecast as it stood, never the reanalysis, which would leak the future. Some of that we have already tested and found worthless. Weather does not beat TAB's goals price in any bucket, over 2,466 matches, so it is context on the card and never a reason to bet.
How picks get ranked. Backwards, on purpose. Agreeing with TAB raises a pick's confidence and disagreeing lowers it. Backing our own number where it beat the market was tested over 1,900 matches and returned −11.0%; two independent estimates landing in the same place is corroboration, while a gap usually means we are missing a lineup. Confidence is how likely a pick is to land, not how much it makes. Best Bets is the one page that inverts this, deliberately, and keeps its own scoreboard to find out whether it works.
Units, and the truth. 1U = $3.00. A suggested size comes from the band and from what you have left, capped at 20% of your remaining balance, which is a bankroll rule and not a claim of edge. The bottom line stays the same: TAB's margin on a match result is 6.3%, their prices are better calibrated than ours (log-loss 0.956 against our 0.980 over 1,900 matches), and over enough bets the pot drains. The research is the return. The $50 is the entry fee.
