What sample size is
Sample size — How many observations a claim rests on. It determines how much the claim can possibly mean.
Signal accumulates in proportion to the number of observations and noise in proportion to its square root. At small numbers the noise dominates completely.
It cuts against pessimism too — a hundred bets at 45 per cent is equally uninformative, and abandoning a process on it is as unjustified as celebrating one.
Here is the catch. Almost every published record is shorter than the length at which it would begin to be evidence, and the shorter it is the more confidently it tends to be presented.
What to do with it. Ask for the count before the percentage, and treat anything under a few hundred as not yet a fact about skill.
Check one. The tipster record checker takes a claimed record and its usual price, and shows the break-even rate and how often luck alone would produce that record.
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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