Method

How it works

Where each number on the site comes from, in a few lines per area.

Elections

We collect polls, expert ratings, candidate and money data, and the national mood.
Fresh polls count most. Where there are few or none, those basics decide.
Then we play the election out thousands of times with realistic poll misses. Our number is the share of those runs a candidate wins.

Our team ratings (Elo, fitted on past seasons) and the injury report give an expected margin. We simulate each game thousands of times; the win chance is the share of runs a team wins.
When the betting market has a price, we blend it in. The market gets most of the say, because over ten seasons it was the most accurate single input, and the blend beat either one alone.
Edge lists the games where our ratings and the market disagree by a lot. Every Edge game is logged before it starts and graded after.

These are the options market's odds, not ours. We turn option prices from Cboe into the chance a stock closes above or below a price by a given date.
Prices refresh before the open and after the close. Not advice to buy or sell.

We start from the Polymarket price: what traders are paying for a yes, read as a chance.
We blend in a base rate (how often things like this happen), giving the market more weight when it is deep and fresh.
One-off questions can't be backtested, so our ranges are wide on purpose. We grade every question when it resolves.

Every call is checked against what happened. See the track record ›