The two ways to use a drop

A drop in your feed can be acted on in two ways, and confusing them is the most expensive mistake in this whole approach. They use the same alert, they need different signals, and only one of them has an edge you can prove at the moment you place the bet.

Way one: beat the fair price

This is value betting, and it is the safer of the two. The sharp book has moved, one of your books has not, and the price you can still get is better than fair. If fair is 2.00 and a soft book shows 2.10, you have roughly a 5% edge, and that edge is real whether or not the bet wins.

The key property is that your edge exists at the moment of the bet and does not depend on anything happening afterwards. The market can reverse, the news can turn out to be wrong, the team can lose. You were still paid more than the true chance was worth.

Way two: bet the move continuing

Here you take a price that does not beat fair, because you expect the line to keep moving in your direction. Pinnacle drops from 2.10 to 2.00, you take 2.00 somewhere with no edge against fair at all, and by kickoff the price is 1.85. You beat the closing line by a distance even though you had nothing at the moment you bet.

How you tell them apart on screen

Different questions, so you look at different parts of the row.

• Way one asks: is any book still above fair? That is the Fair column against prices by book in the panel. If the answer is yes, the size of the drop barely matters.
• Way two asks: will this keep moving? That is the limit going up alongside the drop, how fresh the drop is, how far out kickoff still is, and whether several markets on the same match moved together.

A limit rising with a falling price is the strongest way two signal there is, because a book raising its maximum is inviting more money at the new number. That is a statement about where it thinks the price is going.

How you measure them

Way one can be checked immediately: you either beat fair or you did not, and closing line value later confirms it.

Way two has nothing to check at the time, because by construction there was no edge to point at. Closing line value is the only scoreboard it has. If your anticipation bets show positive CLV over a few dozen attempts, your read on the market is good. If they do not, you are guessing expensively, and no amount of winning bets will prove otherwise.

Which to start with

Way one, without much doubt. It is measurable on the spot, it forgives being wrong about the game, and it teaches you what fair prices look like across markets. Once you have a few hundred bets of history and can see your own CLV, way two becomes a reasonable thing to test deliberately, on smaller stakes, tracked as its own profile so you can tell the two records apart.

Read next: Turning a drop into a bet, What limit changes tell you.