Grade Your Own Bets: How Do You Score a Bet You Won for the Wrong Reason?

[SharpEddie47]

Let me be clear about the problem before proposing anything. Last month I won a spread bet on a game where I had misread the injury report. I believed the starting linebacker was out; he played. I believed the backup quarterback was starting; he did not. I backed the right side for reasons that were wrong on both counts, and it covered by a point and a half. My spreadsheet recorded it as a win. Positive units. It entered the same ROI calculation as every bet I have ever made with a correct read.
That is not a rounding error. It is a design flaw. A profit column measures what happened. It does not measure whether I was right. Across a verified 15-year record of +4.1% ROI, I cannot tell you how much of that number is skill and how much is variance that I recorded as skill.
So I am proposing a grade for every bet, assigned before the result: price, information, stake. Three questions. A winner that fails the information check is a windfall, not evidence.
The question I cannot answer: who is qualified to do the grading?
Trust the process, not your gut.

 

[FadeThePublic]

Here's what nobody wants to hear: the person grading the bet is the same brain that placed it (so good luck with that). I had a reverse line movement spot cash a while back. RIP public money, posted it, felt great. Went back through the line history later and the move came from one book changing its limits, not sharp action. The signal I thought I was fading never existed. Vegas knows, I just had no idea what it knew. That bet is still in my sheet as a clean sharp win.
Also, Eddie: "trust the process." Which one? The one that missed the injury report?

 

[SharpEddie47]

The process that missed the injury report is the process under audit, which is the purpose of an audit. You are conflating a flawed input with a flawed framework. The framework is how I found the error. Do the math on how many of your own reverse line movement wins would survive the same check.
Trust the process, not your gut.

 

[ParlayPrincess_88]

Okay so I'm gonna admit something lol. I had a 5 leg parlay hit and one leg was literally just a feeling. I couldn't tell you why I added it. It was a banger, I posted the slip, everyone said nice. Now I add a feeling leg to every parlay.
I think I graded that bet an A because it paid? Like nobody ever told me the grade was supposed to be about something else

 

[oli_sussex]

Grade before the result. After it, you are grading the result.

 

[FadeThePublic]

Princess, a feeling leg is a coin flip with branding.

 

[ParlayPrincess_88]

lol rude. it was still a banger though

 

[Klaus]

I can offer the reverse of a case I described before.
The Dortmund match I have never rewatched was correct process and a bad outcome. The model was right. The variance resolved against me.
Several seasons ago I had the opposite. A Bundesliga bet with a model edge of 3.1% that won. Two weeks later I found I had entered the wrong starting eleven. With the correct lineup the edge was minus 0.4%.
The result row is still green. I added a column afterwards: model valid, yes or no.
What I noticed: I have never found this one difficult to look at. The 3-1 loss I avoided for years. The invalid win I reviewed in ten minutes. That asymmetry tells me something about what I am protecting, and it is not the money.

 

[TaffyTipster]

Right.
Half my winning bets I wouldn't grade.
Wales at 7/2 after three pints.
It won.
It's in the account as money.
When Bronwyn made me add it all up on that piece of paper I only added the lot.
Never split it into the ones I'd defend and the ones I wouldn't.
Don't think I want that number butt.

 

[FadeThePublic]

Browns fans and Wales fans should have a support group. Nobody would grade anything. We'd just sit in a circle and be right about the wrong things.

 

[TaffyTipster]

Bring tea mun.
Real tea.

 

[CoachTony_Bets]

As a coach, I can tell you the hardest speech I ever gave was after a win. We beat a team we should have lost to. They fumbled three times in our territory and we scored on two of them. The locker room was loud. My son was in there.
I'd watched the film at halftime. Our line was losing nearly every rep. The game plan had failed and we'd been rescued by turnovers. I had to decide whether to tell a room of sixteen-year-olds that the thing making them happy was luck.
I told them. I let them have the win and I made them watch the film Monday. It went quiet. Some were angry. My son didn't look at me the whole bus ride home.
I think there's a middle ground, and I still don't know if I found it. I know I graded that game in front of him in a way I'm not sure I'd do again.

 

[Aionora]

I'd count it as a win, but mark the reasoning as flawed. Both things can be true. The result shouldn't change because the analysis was wrong. But a lucky win shouldn't make a poor decision look better either.
I'd simply record what went wrong, whether the correct information was available beforehand, and what could be improved next time. That's probably where the real learning happens. Not just from the bets we lose, but from the ones we win for the wrong reasons.

 

[DublinDegen]

lads the bet that did the most damage to me was one that won...
nine leg acca picked by names and colours when i was eighteen... a mate dared me... twenty quid... it came in...
i didnt understand i hadnt done anything... nothing i did was in it...
it paid a few grand and what i learned was this is how it works... you pick and it comes in...
seven years of trying to get that feeling back...
id give it an f for process... best bet ive ever won... worst thing that ever happened to me...
the limit i keep trying is writing the reason before i click... half the time i write because its on and click anyway... but at least theres a record now of what i was actually thinking... first time ive had that...

 

[TaffyTipster]

What's the most honest one you've written Conor?

 

[DublinDegen]

backing it because i want it to win and i want to feel something while it plays...

 

[FadeThePublic]

Okay but pre-bet reasons are stories too. "Public heavy, line flat, fade." Sounds like a reason. Isn't one if I never checked the line history. I can write a convincing paragraph for a bad bet in thirty seconds.

 

[Klaus]

Then the reason must name its evidence.
A reason without a checkable fact is a mood.

 

[ThePuntingProf]

One must consider that the difficulty is not merely that one grades a punt in the light of its result, but that the grader is the same person who placed it, and I speak as one who spent twenty-eight years marking other people's examination scripts and found it far easier than marking my own, Margaret understood this better than I did and in the early years of our joint records she insisted that every punt be accompanied by a single written sentence of reasoning composed before the match, and that she, not I, would mark whether the reasoning had been borne out, she did this in pencil in a ledger which I assumed was merely a duplicate of my own, I did not look at it for years, and after she died I found it in the bottom drawer of the study desk, and I discovered that she had kept a second column I had never been shown, headed in her small hand with the single word luck, and that against a number of my winning punts, a number considerably larger than I would have admitted to anyone, she had placed a small mark in that column, I sat in the study with my Earl Grey going cold and counted them, there were two hundred and eleven over twenty-five years, which I later worked out to be a little over a tenth of the winners, and what I could not bring myself to do, and have not done since, is to go back through them and decide whether she was right about each one, because to disagree with a mark would be to argue with her, and to agree with all of them would be to concede that she had been correct about me for most of our marriage, and one does not know which of those is the harder thing to do.

 

[SharpEddie47]

I do not have a column like that. I have a spreadsheet I built to prove something to myself, and I would like to think it is the same as what she kept. It is not. Hers was written by someone who was not me.