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Are you actually good, or just lucky?

Anyone can win a few bets. A coin flip wins half the time. Track your next 30 bets against the market’s final price (Pinnacle’s, a bookmaker that welcomes winners) and see where you stand.

Right before a game starts, the betting price settles on its best guess. That last price is called the closing line.

Think of buying sneakers. If you paid $90 and the store's final price was $100, you got a good deal. If you paid $110, you overpaid. That's true even if you love the sneakers.

Bets work the same way. Whoever picks them, you or your tout, picks that keep getting a better price than the closing line show real skill. Picks that keep getting a worse price are guessing, even in the middle of a winning streak.

Free for everyone

• The market’s price on every slip

• A sanity check in seconds: does this bet hold up?

• Real math in plain words, free with a free account

• The hidden cost of every bet, in dollars

• A fair look at your tout, and questions to ask before you pay

• “Lock” translated: confidence is not odds

• Skill or luck: does a hot streak mean anything?

• The grade needs no account, and we earn nothing when you bet

Premium adds

• Scores each bet you save: did you get a good price, or overpay?

• Keeps your record, and your tout’s, against the market’s final price.

• Shows where you stand after 30 bets: which tout, day or price range is working, and which isn’t.

• Records the market’s final price on every single pick you save, automatically, just before the game starts.

• Makes a report card you can share with your group chat.

• Grades up to five screenshots at once, instead of one at a time.

• Keeps an optional cloud copy of My Journal, so a new phone doesn’t wipe it. You can delete it any time.

• Shows the money behind our grades: what $100 on every possible bet at each grade would have won or lost.

What's the market’s price? It's the price at Pinnacle, a sportsbook that says it welcomes winners. Most sportsbooks limit bettors who win. This one takes big bets and moves its price instead, so in our tests its price ended up the most accurate number we could find. It doesn't take US bets, so most American bettors never see it. BetChecker shows it to you free.

Be your own tout

You already make picks. A tout makes picks too, and charges you for them.

The difference is that a tout asks you to trust the pick. We ask you to check it.

Make your pick. A hunch, a casino favorite, a tip from a friend. It is yours.

We show what you are paid for the chance. If the payout is too small for the chance, you will see it before you bet.

You decide. Bet it or pass. Either way, you chose.

Then keep score. Premium saves each pick and compares it with the market's final price. After a few weeks you can see whether your own picks hold up. No one is selling you anything, and you do not need to take our word for it.

For you, not for sale. BetChecker is for checking your own bets. We are not a place to publish picks, sell them, or follow someone else's.

Know what you're buying

You probably have a reason for every bet. Keep it. We do not judge your pick.

We check one thing: what you are paid, compared with the chance it wins. A big payout is not a good bet. A big payout for the chance is.

Follow whoever you like. Premium keeps score. A year of Premium is $59, about what one month of a typical pick service costs. Pick services we looked at charge $20 to $100 a month, and the middle is around $45.

An example

A bet pays $10 back for every $1. That sounds big. If it wins once in 20 tries, you put in $20 and get $10 back. You lost half. If it wins once in 5 tries, you put in $20 and get $40 back. Same payout, very different bet. The chance is what makes the difference.

This works the same for a tout's pick, a casino's featured bet, or your own hunch. Put it in before the game. If the payout is too small for the chance, pass. On average, you give up nothing by passing.

What we found

No one can promise you a winner. Not a tout, and not us. What we can do is show our work. We tested NFL bets since September 9. Where the payout looked good for the chance, our best grades, it held up against the market's final price about half the time. Our middle-low grade held up 11% of the time. Our lowest grade held up 3% of the time.

Most payouts are worse than they look. In our latest weekend check, 42% of what we looked at got our lowest grade, and about half got the next lowest. Only 1 in 200 got B+ or better.

What we have not shown

We have not shown that our picks win. The 97 bets we flagged went 45 wins, 51 losses and 1 push, and lost $750 at $100 a bet. That is mostly one week of games, and a week proves nothing in either direction. Some bets we graded lowest won, and that is luck too. The Pinnacle's number is an estimate and can be wrong on any one game. Prop numbers are estimates from our own model.

Want to know if your own bets are any good? Premium tracks each one against Pinnacle's final number.

Where the numbers come from

Who is Pinnacle? A bookmaker that takes very large bets, including from players who win, and keeps its own cut small. Because it will take a bet from a smart bettor, its final price before the game tends to be hard to beat. Bettors and analysts use it as the yardstick.

Does that price hold up? An independent betting analyst, Joseph Buchdahl, checked nearly 88,000 soccer prices from four seasons (2016). When a bettor got a better price than Pinnacle's final one, they really did do better, almost exactly as the numbers predicted.

An economist, Karl Whelan, found something similar in NBA games, and a warning too: a better price does not guarantee a profit, because the sportsbook's cut can still eat it.

What we know and don't. Those studies are soccer and basketball, not football. For the NFL we have our own tests only, and they are small. No price is always right.

What we do for you. You could get these numbers yourself: buy the data, write the software to read it, build a screen to see it, and keep it running every week. We do all of that. Checking your pick against Pinnacle's price is free. We pay for the data. We earn from Premium and from ads that are not for gambling. We do not take money from sportsbooks to push you toward a bet.