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Reading a line · piece by piece

Reading lines

Open and close are the two numbers worth recording

The opener is the market's guess before it has spoken. The close is its final answer after everybody who was going to have an opinion has had one.

Between those two points sits every piece of information and every large bet. The distance and direction between them is the market's own account of what it learned.

What the pair tells you A line opening −2.5 and closing −4 says the market changed its mind substantially. Either number alone says nothing about that; the pair is the story.

Openers are posted at low limits and are less reliable than closes, which is why the close is the reference for measuring anybody's price.

And that is the trap. Recording only the number you took means you can never afterwards distinguish being early from being wrong.

What to do with it. Log the opener, your entry and the close for every bet, and review the pattern rather than individual games.

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.

WhatHow oftenOut ofShare
The shorter price won7,05810,93664.5%
The favourite covered the handicap3,3737,00348.2%
The total went over5,51811,23649.1%
The home side won6,36111,26256.5%

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.

WhatHow oftenOut ofShare
Went past regulation1,21216,0217.6%
Settled on a shootout16116,0211.0%
Called before the end916,0210.1%

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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