Reading a hit rate like a professional

Any site that turns that 55% into a recommendation has skipped the only step that matters: 55% of what, against what price, off how many games. Three numbers, not one.

The record

How often has this player cleared this number? Eleven of the last twenty games is 55%. The sample is half the number: 55% off twenty games and 55% off three games are not the same claim, and the second one is barely a claim at all.

The price

Every bookmaker's price contains an opinion about how likely something is. Divide one by the decimal odds and you get it. A price of 1.87 implies 53.5%. That is what the book thinks, expressed as a percentage, before its margin.

The gap

55% against 53.5% is a gap of one and a half points. That is the only number of the three that is about your decision rather than about the world, and it is also the one most likely to be noise.

Why we refuse to colour a small gap

A two-colour scale — green when the record beats the price, red when it does not — silently claims that every market has an edge in one direction. Most do not. A gap of one and a half points off a twenty-game sample is well inside what you would expect from chance alone, and painting it green would be telling you something we do not know.

So the hit rate on this site has three states, not two. Green when the record clears the price by more than the dead band. Red when it falls short by more than the dead band. Plain ink when the two are close enough that the honest answer is that they are close.

What the sample size is actually doing

Twenty games sounds like a lot. It is not. If a player's true rate is exactly 50%, then across twenty games you will see somewhere between about six and fourteen clearances most of the time, just from the coin landing how coins land. That range — 30% to 70% — is what a genuinely even market looks like when you only watch it twenty times.

This is why every number on the site carries its sample next to it, and why a thin one gets a warning rather than a smaller font. A number that cannot support the sentence it is in should not be in the sentence.

What to do with the frame

Read the record. Read the price. Read the gap last, and read the sample before you trust any of it. If the gap is small, the useful conclusion is usually that the market has this one about right — which is a real answer and the most common one, and the reason we would rather show you the working than sell you a list.