Tracking your bets: the eleven fields that matter
A betting record is only useful if it can answer questions you did not think to ask when you made the bet. The fields worth capturing, the two that almost everyone omits, and why a record without them cannot distinguish skill from a good month.
Record the date, event, market, selection, the price you took, the stake in units, the result, and the closing price. The last one is what most people omit and the one that matters most: comparing your price against the closing price measures whether you are beating the market, and it produces a usable signal in a few hundred bets rather than a few thousand.
The fields
| Field | Why it is there | Commonly recorded? |
|---|---|---|
| Date and time of bet | Separates early prices from late ones | Yes |
| Event and competition | Enables breakdown by league | Yes |
| Market and selection | Enables breakdown by market type | Yes |
| Odds taken | Basis for every calculation | Yes |
| Bookmaker | Shows where your prices come from | Sometimes |
| Stake in units | Makes results comparable over time | Sometimes |
| Best price available | Measures line-shopping discipline | Rarely |
| Closing odds | Measures whether you beat the market | Rarely |
| Result and settled return | The outcome | Yes |
| Reason for the bet, one line | Makes patterns reviewable later | Rarely |
| Bets considered and passed | Measures selection, not just execution | Almost never |
Why do closing odds matter more than results?
Results are dominated by variance over any sample you are likely to have. Closing line value is not: it tells you whether the price you took was better than the price the market settled on, and it does so on every bet, won or lost.
A bettor consistently taking prices better than the close is beating the market, whatever the results say this month. A bettor consistently taking worse prices is losing, whatever the results say this month. See closing line value for how it is computed and its limits.
What does a complete record let you ask?
- Am I better at some markets than others, or does it only look that way in a small sample?
- Do my early bets beat my late ones, or the reverse?
- How much am I giving away by not shopping for the best price?
- What is my actual maximum drawdown — and did I size for it?
- Are the bets I passed on winning more often than the ones I took?
None of these can be answered from a list of winners. All of them can be answered from a spreadsheet with eleven columns.
The same principle governs our own published journal. Every signal appears with the price fixed before the event and the settled result afterwards, including the losing runs, and nothing is removed after the fact. A record that can be edited retroactively is not evidence of anything — which is why the ability to reset statistics is one of the checks in how to evaluate a tipster.
Check any of this against our record
Every signal CONSENSUS publishes carries the bookmaker odds fixed before the event starts and the settled result afterwards — including the drawdowns and the losing runs. The running total is on the front page and every entry is in the log.