What variance is
Variance — The spread of outcomes around what was expected. Not luck, but the shape of it.
Independent events cluster more than intuition allows. The eye expects alternation and the mathematics produces streaks, which is why a genuinely random sequence always looks lumpy from inside it.
It cuts both ways. Winning runs of the same length are equally ordinary, and reading those as a hot process is the same error in a better mood.
What follows from that is less comfortable. A normal run misread as a broken process is the moment stakes change, and the change costs more than the run did.
What to do with it. Decide in advance, using the arithmetic, what run length would genuinely be evidence of a problem.
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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