Any tipster can show beautiful statistics if they keep the books themselves: failed picks get deleted, odds get “rounded”, and bets are declared “not the main ones” after the fact. The TheAnalytic verifier is built so that this is technically impossible. Below is exactly what happens to a pick from publication to settlement.
1. Accepted only before the match starts
A pick on a match is accepted while the match has not started. One rule for the whole service: the data provider has marked the match as started, or the scheduled kick-off time has passed, whichever comes first. After that, the “publish” button simply does not exist, and this is enforced by code at save time, not by a moderator afterwards. A pick submitted after kick-off does not exist.
2. The odds are captured by the server
The author chooses the bookmaker and the selection but does not enter the price. At the moment of publication the server takes the odds from the chosen bookmaker’s current line and stores them with the pick. The opening price of that line is stored alongside, and the closing price at kick-off. The three points on a pick’s page, opening, publication and closing, are that record; CLV is computed from it.
3. A bet cannot be edited or deleted
A published pick becomes immutable: neither the selection, nor the odds, nor the stake, nor the reasoning. It cannot be deleted either, by the author or by the service. The verifier’s header shows a counter “can be edited afterwards”: with working code it equals zero, and that is the whole point of showing it.
4. Settled from the match result
The outcome of a pick — win, loss, void, half — is derived automatically from the final score and match statistics: goals, corners, cards. The author does not mark the result. Quarter handicaps are settled with half outcomes, as bookmakers do; rounding them to “won/lost” would distort the track record.
5. The stake is a share of the bankroll
Every feed starts with a notional bankroll. The stake is fixed as a percentage of the bankroll at the moment of publication, and that is how ROI and the bankroll curve are computed. An author cannot retroactively declare a lost bet “small”.
Closed picks
A pick from a paid feed is visible only to subscribers before the match starts. After kick-off it is revealed to everyone: otherwise a paid author’s track record could not be verified. So the results of any feed, paid ones included, are open and computed by the platform in the same way.
Picks restored retroactively
Part of the TheAnalytic models’ history is restored from matches already played: the model’s estimate at the time is confirmed by a timestamp, and the odds are taken from the opening line. Such picks are marked as archived, shown in the profile with a caveat, and do not count towards the rating. Humans have no restored picks and cannot have any.
What remains for the reader to judge
The service guarantees that the numbers are not forged. It does not guarantee that they mean anything: 15 picks with +40% ROI are noise. The minimum samples for entering the rating and the confidence intervals are described in the rating methodology.