The Italian Draw: a betting hypothesis, registered before the season

Status

Registered · goes live with the first Serie A / Serie B match of the 2026-27 season (August 2026). Selections will appear in the public track record.

The hypothesis

Across six seasons of opening odds, the draw in Italy returned more than it should: Serie B blind-draw EV +7.2% (CI95 +0.5% to +14.3%, positive in 6 of 6 seasons), Serie A +4.9%, with a clean gradient — short draw odds (≤3.5) strongly positive in both leagues, long draw odds negative. Plausible mechanism: nobody loves the draw, so its price receives the least market correction.

The frozen rules (summary)

1. Every 2026-27 Serie A and Serie B match with Pinnacle prices in our feed.
2. Flag the draw (X) if and only if Pinnacle's opening draw odds are ≤ 3.50. No other filter, no discretion.
3. Flat 1-unit stakes; entry at our first Pinnacle snapshot; benchmark = Pinnacle close (same-book CLV).
4. Primary metric: average CLV with 95% bootstrap CI. Full season, no early stopping.
5. Success declared only if the CI excludes zero. Otherwise the strategy is declared dead and gets a public autopsy.
6. Every selection is logged before kick-off in the public track record and cannot be edited or removed.

🔒 Proof the rules were fixed in advance

The complete specification is frozen in a public file. Its SHA-256 hash is committed to our public GitHub ledger and anchored in the Bitcoin blockchain via OpenTimestamps. If we ever changed a comma after seeing results, the hash would change and the tampering would be provable.

Read the frozen specification → Verify on GitHub (with OpenTimestamps proof) →

Live ledger — every selection, logged before kick-off

95% bootstrap confidence interval for average CLV: +7.31% to +49.57% (on 29 settled selections with a closing price). The pre-registered success criterion is an interval entirely above zero at season end.

Selections are written to this ledger before kick-off and never edited afterwards; the daily public snapshot on GitHub is timestamped externally, so any later change would be visible. Entry price is Pinnacle's opening draw price from our first snapshot; CLV compares it to Pinnacle's closing price on the same market — no line shopping. Wins and losses appear here alike, and the season runs to the end regardless of how it looks in between. Documented outage (rule 6): our odds feed ran out of provider credits between 12 August and 1 September 2026, so matchweek 2 has no opening prices and no selections. It is not backfilled — logging it after the results were known would break the rule that makes this test meaningful.

Why this might fail (written before, not after)

Italy came out of a scan of 17 leagues, so multiple-testing risk is real. The ≤3.5 band was chosen after seeing the data. Market effects decay. That is exactly why this is a forward test with pre-committed rules and not a betting recommendation: if the edge is a mirage, you will watch it die here, in public, and it will get its own entry in our strategy graveyard. Read the explainer →