BETPOOL

Methodology

What we measure, how we measure it, and what we cannot see.

How a record is built

Every number on a Betpool card is reproducible from two public sources: a post someone made in public, and the Polymarket order book. Nothing here comes from a private feed, an insider, or our opinion.

1. Resolving a pick to a market

A post like “Taking the Astros -1.5 tonight” is matched to a specific Polymarket market. The matcher requires the market to be a real fixture, verified by the presence of a game start time, which excludes futures and manager-appointment markets that happen to name the same team.

Matches are scored, and anything below 0.60 confidence is held for human review rather than published. This threshold was raised from 0.45 after every case in that band turned out to be the wrong market naming the right teams. A wrong match is worse than no match, because it produces a confident public number about a named person.

2. The price at the moment of the post

We record the price a follower could actually have taken when the post went up, not the price the poster got. Every price is labelled:

• live — read from the order book within the hour.
• estimated — reconstructed from hourly price history around the timestamp. Always shown as an estimate, permanently.

3. Grading

Two numbers, and we lead with the second:

• Tail return — what one flat unit bought at the posted price returned. Not what the poster's own wallet made.
• CLV, closing line value — how far the market moved toward or away from the pick, in cents. CLV converges in tens of picks where return needs hundreds, and unlike return it cannot be rescued by a single lucky longshot.

4. Was there a position behind it?

When a wallet is linked, each pick is classified into exactly one state:

• Positioned before posting — held the called side already. This is normal and is presented positively; entering before you post is the point, not a violation.
• Bought after posting — opened within 24 hours.
• No matching position found in linked wallet — nothing above the stake floor, either way. This does not mean they did not bet. People have more than one account and we can only see the wallet that is linked.
• Opposite side — held against their own call.
• Sold into the call — held it, then sold more than half within 12 hours of posting.

The stake floor is the greater of $25 or 10% of that wallet's median historical stake, so a token position cannot earn a badge.

5. What a record cannot see

This is the most important section on the page.

Archived means we captured the post when it was made. That record is complete and cannot be edited afterwards, including by us.

Reconstructed means we built it from a public timeline after the fact. Deleted posts are not visible to anyone, including us, so a reconstructed record is biased in the subject's favour: the picks they removed are the ones missing. Every reconstructed card says so.

6. Corrections and disputes

If a card about you is wrong, we want to fix it, and the correction is public. Disputes are logged with the original evidence and the outcome. Contact is on the home page.

What we will never publish

• Any claim about intent. We publish what was posted and what the chain shows, and nothing about why.
• A number that cannot be reproduced from a public post plus public chain data.
• An estimated price presented as an exact one.