First Win

Institutional-grade research on sports betting markets.

We study how betting markets price outcomes, and publish the results in full: the data, the method, the uncertainty, and the parts that did not work. No picks, no tips, no promises about beating anyone.

Read the latest research Explore the historical market

What you can learn here

Research notes

Long-form studies of market behaviour, each frozen against a versioned dataset so the numbers can be checked rather than taken on trust.

Historical Explorer

Ask what actually happened when the market looked a particular way, across six seasons of MLB moneyline closing prices.

Open data

Every published figure ships with machine-readable tables and a hash of the specification it was computed against.

Latest research

The MLB moneyline is almost perfectly calibrated. Every bucket still lost money.

23,992 closing moneylines from 2021 to 2025. Every probability band’s calibration interval contains zero, and yet all ten price buckets lost money. The gap between those two facts is the vig.

Bets analysed23,992

Return on risk-3.55%

Vig per side+1.87 pp

Read the full research note

Why trust it

Methods are frozen before results are computed. Every publication carries the SHA-256 of the specification it was run against, so a bucket cannot be moved after seeing what it produced.
Uncertainty is reported, not hidden. Results that cannot be distinguished from chance are described that way, including when that makes the finding less interesting.
The data is published. Tables and chart-ready series are downloadable alongside every note, and the site recomputes nothing it did not publish.
Corrections are published too. When a method is found to be wrong it is versioned, explained, and the original is kept as provenance.

First Win Pro

Founding Member

The research on this site stays free to read. Pro funds the work behind it, and gets you the parts that do not fit in a public note.

What you get today

Premium research notes, in addition to everything published free
Extended analysis: robustness checks, sensitivity work and the results that did not survive them
Downloadable research data where the underlying licence permits redistribution
Early access to new research before it is published publicly

What founding membership reserves

Founding-member access to First Win Pro functionality as it is built
A say in which questions get researched next

These are not built yet. Founding membership is a claim on them, not a description of something you can use today.

First Win Pro opens shortly. Founding membership is not yet on sale, so there is nothing to buy today. The free research below continues either way, and the newsletter above will carry the announcement.

Institutional / Data Access

The corpus and research engine behind this site can support work beyond the published notes:

Research and data licensing
Historical sports market datasets
Programmatic API and data access
Custom research on a specific market question
Institutional access for desks and research teams

Enquire about institutional access