How Agatha Works

The precogs

Agatha's brain is an army of precogs, competing prediction formulas, each a distinct combination of model family and parameters. Every precog marches through 20+ years of games in strict chronological order, never seeing the result of the game it's picking, only what happened before. It may sit out any game, but it must show up every season. Its entire blind record is graded. Survivors are selected on one stretch of seasons, then must hold up on a later stretch they never touched: luck dies there. Agatha's published pick comes from an ensemble of the most stable survivors.

What confidence means

Confidence is a calibrated probability, nothing else. When Agatha says 65, she expects to lose 35 of every 100 such picks, and the track record lets you check that the numbers keep their promise. A pick makes the front page as a Best Bet only at a price longer than -250 (1.40 decimal) and a confidence of 55 or more, or 45 or more for an EDGE, a pick from a model validated against its own graded history (today only the WNBA has one). A heavy favorite never qualifies, however sure she is, and neither does a confidence over 95. Some sports add a check of their own: a tennis pick needs both players to have at least 10 rated matches, a UFC bout with a debuting fighter stays a Prediction, an NFL or college football winner pick that sits more than 15 points from the betting odds, or an NHL, NBA, MLS or college basketball pick more than 28, stays a Prediction, and in the CFL and MLS, in the NFL's last regular-season week and in the last two weeks of the NHL and NBA regular seasons, a game where a team's playoff seeding is already settled stays a Prediction. All Picks on the track record adds every other pick she made, each sealed and graded the same way.

Units

Every pick carries two numbers. Confidence answers "how often does this win", a calibrated probability and nothing else. Units answer "how much does this pick carry", and that answer never changes: every pick is one unit, edge and lean alike. Nothing is sized up for conviction and nothing is sized down for doubt. If a call is not worth a full unit, it is not listed.

Flat staking is what makes a record readable: no stretch of results can be dressed up by pressing harder on the picks that happened to land. A unit is whatever you decide it is worth; the record is kept in units so it reads the same at any size. Picks listed before this rule keep the size they were listed at, because a listed pick is never edited.

The tags beside a pick describe it, they do not size it. EDGE is a pick from a model validated against its own graded history, LEAN is Agatha's call on a game no validated model covers yet, and DOG marks a moneyline pick at plus odds, 2.00 or longer. All three are staked the same.

Honest expectations

Sportsbook closing lines are among the most efficient predictions on earth. A hit rate means nothing without its price: at -110 a pick must win 52.4% of the time just to break even, at -200 it must win 66.7%. Against the spread at -110, a good model wins 50 to 53 percent over the long run, and anyone claiming 60%+ sustained there is lying to you. Most of Agatha's Best Bets are favorites, and a favorite has to win more often just to break even, so her hit rate proves nothing on its own: the fair test is units at the sealed prices, shown beside every hit rate on the track record, and a short record proves little either way. If her units over a long run ever looked too good to be true, we'd treat it as a bug (data leakage), not genius. Agatha's goals: honest calibration, disciplined value-taking including underdogs, and full transparency: the record as it happens, wins and losses in the same font.

The rules the record lives by

• Every pick is timestamped and hashed before its game starts; nothing is edited or deleted.
• Every pick is frozen 15 minutes before its start (earlier for a tennis or esports match that follows another on its court or stream). The frozen version is what gets graded, at its stored line and price, and it is sealed on chain within minutes.
• Pushes are excluded from hit rate; every pick is staked at one unit.
• Postponements and voided markets grade as void. Published "no pick" days are content, not absence.
• No model's pick is tagged EDGE until the model carries the full toolkit for its sport and passes validation; nothing that happened before a model went live is ever shown as record.

Every settlement rule, sport by sport, is written out in how Agatha grades every pick, and the betting words this site uses are defined in the betting glossary.

What Agatha is not

Not a sportsbook, not a tout, not a guarantee. Predictions are statistical opinions for information and entertainment.