Betting has a lot of jargon. None of it is complicated once someone explains it.
Here is all of it.
The basics
Odds (also: price)
What you get back if you win, including your own money.
Bet €10 at odds of 2.70 and you get €27 back — your €10 plus €17 profit.
Lose, and you're out the €10.
Stake
How much money you put on one bet.
Bankroll
The total pot of money you bet with. Kept separate from everything else in your life.
Every stake is a percentage of it.
ROI (return on investment)
Profit for every €100 you bet. "+5%" means you staked €100 and finished with €105.
This is the number that actually matters.
Strike rate (also: hit rate)
How often a signal lands, as a percentage of the ones that have finished.
Not a profit figure on its own — whether it makes money depends entirely on the
price, which is what break-even odds tell you. We withhold
it until a signal type has 30 settled results, because a percentage off nine
bets is noise wearing a number.
Break-even odds
The price a strike rate needs just to come out level — 1 ÷ the strike rate.
At 84% it is 1.19. Take the bet only if the odds you are offered are
higher than that: above it you are being paid more than the bet is worth, at or
below it you lose over time, however often the tip lands.
It assumes the strike rate holds, and it is measured over that row's settled
signals and nothing else. It says nothing about what price your bookmaker will show
you — that is why you check it against your own screen.
Variance (also: luck)
The reason good bettors have bad months and bad bettors have good ones.
Over a few hundred bets, luck is louder than skill. Over thousands, skill wins.
Drawdown
The worst drop from your best-ever point. If you hit €10,000 and fell to €6,500,
that's a 35% drawdown. This is the pain number — the one that makes people quit.
The kinds of bet
1X2
The simplest bet: home win, draw, or away win. Also called the match-result market.
Over / Under 2.5
A bet on total goals by both teams. "Over 2.5" wins if there are 3 or more goals.
"Under 2.5" wins with 2 or fewer. The .5 exists so there can be no tie.
Asian handicap
One team is given a head start (or a deficit) to make an uneven match into a coin flip.
"Home −0.5" means the home team must simply win. "Home −1.5" means they must win by
two or more goals.
Push
A tie against the handicap or the goals line — your stake is handed straight back.
Not a win, not a loss.
How we find a bet
The margin (also: the vig, the overround)
The bookmaker's built-in cut, hidden inside the odds. On a coin flip, fair odds are 2.00;
a bookmaker offers 1.90 and keeps the difference. Typically about 6% of everything
you stake — which is why most bettors slowly lose without ever making a mistake.
Sharp bookmaker vs soft bookmaker
A sharp book prices extremely accurately and welcomes winners. A soft book
prices more loosely and restricts people who win. When two books disagree about the
same result, one of them is wrong — and it is rarely the sharp one. Finding those
disagreements, and judging which are worth acting on, is the work.
Fair odds (shown as "Fair odds")
What the bet is genuinely worth once the bookmaker's cut is stripped out, in
the odds you are used to. If the fair odds are 2.06 and someone is offering
2.20, you are being paid more than the bet is worth — and that gap is the
whole point. (2.06 is a 48.5% chance: 1 ÷ 0.485.)
Edge
How much more you're being paid than the bet is worth. If the fair price is 2.06 and
someone offers 2.70, that's roughly a +30% edge.
A €20 note on sale for €15.
Slippage
Getting a slightly different price from the one we published — usually a little
worse — because odds move between the moment we find a bet and the moment you place
it, or because your bookmaker will not take your full stake. It can happen at your
own bookmaker; it is not built into our numbers. Every figure we publish — the
pre-match account, the backtest, every edge and every CLV — is at the price the
bookmaker actually offered, with nothing deducted. Log the price you really got in
My Bets and your own record shows your own slippage.
How we prove it works
The closing line (also: the final price)
The last price before kick-off. It's the combined opinion of everyone in the world who
bet on that match, and it is startlingly accurate — like averaging ten thousand guesses
at the sweets in a jar.
CLV (closing line value)
Whether you got a better price than that final price. Buy a concert ticket for €100 and
by showtime it's worth €102.61 — you bought well, whether or not the concert was any
good. Same here: a bet can be a good buy and still lose.
Why we lead with it: profit takes years to prove because luck drowns it out.
CLV shows up in weeks. Across 286,398 historical bets it predicted real profit almost
exactly one-for-one.
Why we bet days early, not at the closing price
A fair question: if the closing price is the accurate one, why not wait for it?
Because the closing price is the exam, not the textbook. You do not get
to see it while you are deciding. What you have at decision time is the sharp
bookmaker's price right now — not perfect, but far better than the sloppy
book's price at that same moment. The edge is the gap between the two, and it
never depended on the sharp book being flawless.
And the gap is widest early. Soft bookmakers drift toward the sharp price
as kick-off nears, so waiting for the close means waiting for the value to disappear.
The closing price then grades us afterwards — that is the
CLV column.
Beat the close
How often we got a better price than the final price. Around two times in three.
Signal
One bet the scanner has flagged as worth more than its price.
Bankroll and risk
Kelly
A 1956 formula for the bet size that would grow money fastest if you knew your
edge exactly — which nobody does. Its lasting lesson is about risk: betting more than it
implies makes a bankroll grow slower, not faster, and far beyond it even a genuine
edge loses money. How much you bet is always your own decision; Grecotipster never
suggests a stake.
Still unclear on something? That's our failure, not yours — tell us and we'll rewrite it.