Wins are noisy over small samples. Your log tracks on every ticket — the gap between the price you took and the market's — so the is measured instead of claimed. Click any underlined term to open its definition in the glossary below.
The scoreboard
CLV stands for Closing Line Value — the single most important metric sharp bettors use to measure long-term profitability. The closing line is the final price offered on a game right before it starts. Because sharp money moves lines right up until kickoff, the closing number is treated as the most accurate representation of true market probability. CLV measures whether the odds you took were better than the odds at close.
Why tracking CLV matters
Individual results carry enormous variance — terrible bets win and great bets lose. CLV removes luck from the equation. Consistently positive CLV means you are beating the market, and over a few hundred bets that almost always turns into profit. Every bet you log here is stamped with the price you actually got versus the closing number, so you can prove whether your strategy has a real, sustainable edge instead of guessing from a win-loss record.
How we calculate CLV
CLV % = (fair prob at close × your decimal payout) − 1
Equivalent shortcut: compare the implied probability of your price to the de-vigged closing probability — if yours is lower, you got the better number.
You captured 5% of value versus the closing number. Whether that specific bet won or lost is irrelevant — repeat that 200 times and the edge shows up in the bankroll.
is the gap between the price you took and the at the moment the market closes. Take a prop at +120 that closes at a fair +105 and you captured roughly 6.8% of value, whether the ticket won or lost. It answers a different question from profit: not did this bet pay, but was this bet priced better than the market's final word.
At -110 with a genuine 3% , your true win probability is about 54%. Over 100 bets the standard deviation of your record is around 5 wins, so a 49-51 stretch is entirely ordinary for a profitable strategy, and a 57-43 stretch is ordinary for a losing one. You need many hundreds of settled bets before profit separates skill from noise, which is far too slow to manage a strategy on.
Each graded ticket produces a number regardless of outcome, so there is no coinflip attached to the measurement. That removes almost all of the variance from the signal: a few dozen tickets of consistently positive CLV is stronger evidence of an than a hundred profitable tickets with negative CLV, which is simply a run of good luck on bad prices.
Every logged bet stores the price taken, the book, the market and the timestamp. When the market closes, the closing two-sided price is and compared against your entry, producing in percentage terms alongside win/loss and profit. Results are settled from official league feeds, so grading does not depend on you reporting your own outcomes.
One +9% ticket can hide twenty small negatives, so look at the share of tickets with positive , not just the mean. A healthy log shows more than half of tickets positive with a modest average; a log with a low hit rate on CLV and one huge outlier usually means a stale price was captured once rather than an being repeated.
Systematically negative means the market moved through your price and your entries are late or your reference is wrong. The one honest exception is a limited account where you cannot get the at size; there, mildly negative CLV with real profit can persist. Outside that case, treat persistent negative CLV as a signal to change entry timing, not to wait for results to improve.