How to verify a settled pick yourself

Everything you need is printed on the archive row itself, and none of it is behind the paywall once a day has settled. Seven fields, one vertical bar between each, SHA-256. It takes one line in a terminal, and it depends on nothing we do afterwards.

1. Take the fields off the row

Open the results archive and pick a settled day. You need eight things from it — seven that go into the string, plus the hash you are checking against:

• the date of the day
• the fixture, exactly as printed: away team, spaced em dash, home team
• the market
• the published price and the minimum price
• the kick-off time, copied exactly, offset included
• the salt, which appears on the row once the pick has settled
• the commitment hash, which has been on the row since before kick-off

2. Join them with a bar and hash it

3. The five things that trip people up

• Two decimals, always. The archive shows a price as 1.9; the hashed string carries 1.90. Both prices are written to exactly two decimals.
• The bar has no spaces around it. It is a single character between fields.
• The fixture is one field. Away team, space, em dash, space, home team — copy it from the row rather than retyping it, because a hyphen is not an em dash.
• The kick-off is copied verbatim, in the ISO 8601 form the archive prints, with its offset.
• Use printf, not echo. A trailing newline is part of the input and changes the hash.

If it does not match

Check the two decimals and the em dash first; that is nearly always it. If it still does not match, write to [email protected] with the date of the day — that is enough, nothing else is needed — and we will send back that day's receipt. A row that does not verify is a fault worth stopping for, not a rounding error, and it is treated as one: we run the same check before every release and again before every salt is published, and a row that fails either one is blocked rather than shown.