Where our odds and fair prices come from

Where the prices come from

Odds are licensed from OddsBlaze, a professional feed covering the US-licensed sportsbooks we track, and reach the app through one pricing service that holds the live board in memory. No copy of that board is stored anywhere, on purpose. We keep an opening and a closing price per market, which is what line history and closing line value are built on, but never a saved board that could be served back to you as a live one. So when that service cannot answer, the Bet Feed shows Fetching the latest data, says it only shows live prices, and offers a Retry button, rather than handing you numbers nobody can vouch for. That screen means the feed is reconnecting, not that something is wrong with your account.

Vig, and what a fair price really is

Every sportsbook builds a margin into both sides of a market — the vig, or juice. It is why a coin-flip market is priced -110 / -110 rather than +100 / +100: those two prices imply 52.4% each, and 104.8% between them. The extra 4.8% is the house’s cut. A fair price is what is left once that margin comes back out — the process is called de-vigging.

1. 1

   Start from a sharp book’s two sides

   Say a sharp book has Team A at -140 and Team B at +120. Those imply 58.3% and 45.5% — 103.8% in total, so there is 3.8% of margin in the line.

2. 2

   Take the margin back out three ways

   Three standard methods run on every market: multiplicative (scale both sides down), additive (subtract the margin equally) and power (find the exponent that makes both sides sum to 100%). Here they put Team A’s true chance between roughly 56.2% and 56.6%.

3. 3

   Keep the most conservative answer

   The shipped default keeps the lowest of the three — 56.2%, a fair price of about -128. Keeping the smallest edge means we understate an opportunity rather than talk it up.

4. 4

   Compare your book against it

   If another book is offering Team A at -120, you are being paid more than -128 is worth. That difference is the edge printed on the card.

A candidate line whose sides add up to less than 100%, beyond a small tolerance for rounding, is thrown out rather than de-vigged. That is an impossible line — it implies free money — and de-vigging it would manufacture an edge instead of removing a margin.

Which book sets the fair price

Not every book gets a vote. For each league and market, one book is configured as the primary benchmark; the others are only compared against it. Whichever source was used is marked next to Fair on the bet card, so you can always see where the number came from. No book pays to be the benchmark, or to appear on a card at all — how DawBets makes money covers that.

A source must price the whole bet — both sides, or all three outcomes of a draw market. When nothing prices the other side, the bet still appears for price comparison but carries no edge.

From fair price to expected value

Expected value is one line of arithmetic: decimal odds × fair probability − 1. Above, that is 1.833 × 0.562 − 1, or about +3% — three cents per dollar staked, averaged over the long run. It is not a forecast: a bet with a real edge still loses often, and losing weeks are normal. From there the card adds what the badges mean and a suggested stake.

How fresh the price is

The pricing service drops any slice of the market it has not refreshed recently, and the app refuses rows older than its own display floor, so it can never show a price the source has stopped maintaining. On Plus and Pro a green LIVE pill sits beside the Bet Feed title. Bet Check verdicts and game-page prop rows carry an Updated stamp instead. Free and guest accounts are served the previous snapshot of the board rather than the current one, so prices arrive after they have moved — see why your feed says delayed.

What we are not claiming

• ●Fair prices are market-derived, not predictive. They reflect what the sharpest money currently thinks, not a guaranteed true probability.
• ●Sharp books are not ground truth. They are the best available proxy, and they are wrong sometimes.
• ●EV is a long-run average. Individual bets lose regardless of edge size.
• ●Stake sizing assumes bets are independent. Correlated bets — same game, same player — deserve smaller stakes than the suggestion.