What steam is
Steam is a line moving fast and in the same direction across many bookmakers at once. Not one shop adjusting its own number, but the market turning together within minutes.
What causes it
Sometimes news that everybody received at the same moment. Sometimes large money placed at several bookmakers in a short window, deliberately. From the outside these look identical: a move carries no signature and does not say why it happened. Anyone telling you which of the two it was is telling you what they think, not what they know.
Why chasing it is usually late
By the time a move is visible to you as a move, it has already happened. The price you saw is the price that is gone; the one you can now bet is the new one, and the new one already contains whatever caused the change. Taking a side because it just got more expensive means paying for the information after it has been priced in.
What we do instead
We publish before the game, with a market, a side, a line, a price and a floor beneath it. If the market has run past the floor by the time you look, the answer is to skip that bet; the day counts the same for your package either way. We do not publish a pick because a line moved, and a line moving after publication does not change what the pick was.
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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