Closing line value (CLV), explained

What CLV measures

The closing line is the last price a sportsbook posts before a game starts — the market’s final answer, once the injury news, the lineups and the late money have landed. Closing line value asks one question: did you get a better number than that?

It judges your decision rather than the result. A bet can lose and still have beaten the close — and that is the point: your profit and loss needs a very large sample before it says anything, while the close answers on every bet.

The math, worked

DawBets converts both prices — the one you took and the one your book closed at — into implied win chances, then measures how far the market moved toward you. Say you take the Over at +120 and it closes at +100:

50.0 ÷ 45.45 − 1 gives +10.0%: the market finished rating your side about a tenth more likely than the price you were paid on. A negative number is the mirror image — the market moved away from you, and a better price than yours came along later.

The comparison is against your own sportsbook’s last posted price, not a market-wide fair line. The sharpest reference book does not post most player props, so the same-book comparison is the one DawBets can make honestly on every bet it scores instead of on a minority of them.

Which bets get a CLV score

A bet is scored once it has settled, and only when all of these hold — one rule set, shared by the bet card, the dashboard tile and the Claude connector.

• ●You bet before kickoff. An in-play bet has no pre-game close to beat, so it is never scored.
• ●The closing price still described a real market. A "close" implying near-certainty is a decided outcome, not a line anyone could have bet, so it is thrown out.
• ●The close was recorded near enough to kickoff to trust. At least one book leaves markets running in-play under the same id, so a price captured long after the whistle is no close.
• ●A close recorded after the scheduled start moved by a plausible pre-game amount. Events start late all the time, so timing alone cannot separate a late close from an in-play price — past the start, an implausibly large swing is dropped. Large moves *before* the start are real, and are kept.
• ●It is not a parlay. A parlay has no single closing line, so it never shows a CLV pill and never enters your sample.

Why a bet shows no CLV number

DawBets has to have captured a closing price for that exact market. A background job records prices for rows on the positive-EV pre-game board, asks the book for the close shortly after kickoff, and stops asking some hours later. A bet tracked off a row that was never on that board has nothing to score against — no pill, no entry in your sample.

So the reliable way to build a CLV record is to track pre-game bets from the bet feed while they still carry positive expected value — those are the rows the job watches.

Reading the Beat close tile

The Beat close tile on My Bets shows the share of your *decided* scored bets where you got the better number, with a beat–miss–push record under it. The How it works row below the profit chart opens the same explainer in the app. Tracking is a paid feature: see Plans.

The rate stays hidden until you have enough scored bets for it to mean anything; until then the tile counts down.

Taking exactly the closing number is a push. American prices move in whole steps, so it happens constantly, and it means the market never moved — not that you were wrong. Pushes sit outside the rate on both sides, the way a refunded bet stays out of a win–loss record. Hence the record beneath: 16-0-2 is sixteen beats, no misses, two pushes — a real 100% rate on the sixteen that were decided. A dash instead of a percentage means everything pushed.

The breakdown panel on the same page reports Median CLV, not an average: one enormous mover — a moneyline drifting from +1950 to +129 — would drag a mean away from your typical bet.

What CLV does and does not prove

CLV strips much of the luck out of a sample far smaller than your profit and loss needs, so it steadies long before your profit does. It is evidence about the prices you got. It is not a forecast.