Hit rate vs. ROI
Most touts advertise a win rate. Win rate is the wrong metric. ROI is the right one. The math of how to evaluate a strategy honestly.
Picks services advertise hit rates. '60% winners last month.' '7-3 last weekend.' Hit rate is the metric that sells subscriptions. It is also the metric that tells you almost nothing about whether a bettor is actually profitable.
The problem in one example
Two bettors. Bettor A wins 60% of bets at -200 odds. Bettor B wins 40% of bets at +200 odds. Both bet $100 per bet. Run them out for 100 bets each. Who is profitable?
BETTOR A: 60% at -200 60 wins × $50 profit = +$3,000 40 losses × $100 = -$4,000 net result = -$1,000 ROI = -10% BETTOR B: 40% at +200 40 wins × $200 profit = +$8,000 60 losses × $100 = -$6,000 net result = +$2,000 ROI = +20%
Bettor A has a 60% hit rate and is losing money. Bettor B has a 40% hit rate and is making money. Hit rate without odds is uninterpretable.
Breakeven hit rate by odds
| American odds | Decimal | Breakeven hit rate |
|---|---|---|
| -300 | 1.333 | 75.0% |
| -200 | 1.500 | 66.7% |
| -150 | 1.667 | 60.0% |
| -110 | 1.909 | 52.4% |
| +100 | 2.000 | 50.0% |
| +150 | 2.500 | 40.0% |
| +200 | 3.000 | 33.3% |
| +300 | 4.000 | 25.0% |
When someone tells you their hit rate, ask what odds. A 56% hit rate at -110 is genuine edge. A 56% hit rate at -150 is losing money.
What ROI tells you (and does not)
ROI is the percentage profit on total handle. It captures both win rate and price together. A bettor with +5% ROI made 5 cents in profit for every dollar staked, regardless of what odds the bets were at.
ROI = (total profit) / (total handle) BETTOR B: 100 bets, $100 each, $2,000 profit total handle = $10,000 ROI = 20%
ROI is the right metric. But it has a problem of its own: variance. A 100-bet ROI is noisy. A bettor can post +10% ROI on a 100-bet sample and be a -2% EV strategy that got lucky.
What touts hide
Two common patterns to watch for in tout marketing.
- Cherry-picked windows. The '7-3 last weekend' headline. Three days of data is meaningless. Touts pick the windows that sell.
- Hit rate without odds. The '60% winners' headline. Without odds, the metric is uninterpretable. The tout knows this.
- Unit-based reporting that hides bet size. 'Up 15 units' is meaningless without unit definition. A 1% bankroll unit and a 10% bankroll unit are not the same; the second is a much bigger swing.
An honest performance report includes: number of bets, average odds (or distribution), unit definition, ROI on handle, drawdown across the period, and (ideally) closing line value.
What WagerBird publishes
The WagerBird Results page shows daily and rolling-window hit rates and effective ROI by confidence band. The reporting is honest about the temporal cap (30 days public; longer windows are inside the product). It does not cherry-pick. It does not promise outcomes. It shows what the model has actually delivered. See Results.
What to read next
Closing line value is the leading indicator that converges faster than ROI. Variance and drawdown is what to expect even when your ROI metric is real.