Futures and outrights: one winner from a field
A futures bet is on the outcome of a whole competition, settled when the competition ends. It is a single market with as many prices as there are entrants, and only one of them can win. The stake is committed from the moment it is placed until the season or tournament finishes.
The book prices every runner in the field and takes margin on each of them, so the overround is the sum of all the implied probabilities rather than a spread across two. With thirty or a hundred entries each carrying a slice of margin, the total can reach a level no two-way market ever approaches.
The stake is also dead money for the duration. Money in a futures market cannot be redeployed, cannot be improved if the price moves your way, and earns nothing while it sits there. That is a real cost that never appears in any calculation of the bet's value.
The problem arrives next. Withdrawal and non-runner rules are where futures settle differently from everything else. Depending on the market, a competitor who never takes part may void the bet, may lose it, or may trigger a deduction from the winning price. Long-dated markets are exactly the ones where that happens.
What to do with it. Sum the implied probabilities of the entire field before backing anything in it, and read the non-runner rule.
The archive
What the published price did in US sports
11,262 games in US sports that are over and carried a price when we wrote them up, between November 24, 2025 and November 6, 2026. Each count sits beside what it is out of, and the share is the one divided by the other.
| What | How often | Out of | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| The shorter price won | 7,058 | 10,936 | 64.5% |
| The favourite covered the handicap | 3,373 | 7,003 | 48.2% |
| The total went over | 5,518 | 11,236 | 49.1% |
| The home side won | 6,361 | 11,262 | 56.5% |
How they ended
Over 16,021 finished games in US sports whose result line says how it ended — the feed's own one-line verdict, not a reading of the play.
| What | How often | Out of | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Went past regulation | 1,212 | 16,021 | 7.6% |
| Settled on a shootout | 161 | 16,021 | 1.0% |
| Called before the end | 9 | 16,021 | 0.1% |
286 games landed exactly on the number — the handicap or the total — so they are in the counts they are out of and in neither result.
The prices counted here are DraftKings', as they stood when we last wrote each game up — one snapshot per game, near kick-off for almost all of them, and never a closing line. So this says what the published line did, not how it moved on the way there.
A season that happened. Nothing here predicts the next game, and none of it is advice.
Counted November 6, 2026.
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