How BetsPal works

A pick on BetsPal goes through three states: pending, live and settled. Settlement uses the final score of the real game, and your record is worked out from settled picks only. Here's each step, the maths behind the numbers, and a worked example you can check by hand.

BetsPal is free and just for fun. There is no real money, no stake and no bookmaker: odds and units only exist to score the record. 18+.

1. Posting a pick

You start from the fixture list of real upcoming games, not a blank text box. That matters: every pick is attached to one specific game, so there's never any doubt about which match you meant.

• Market: the winner (moneyline) or total goals or points (over/under).
• Selection: for example "Arsenal to win", "Celtics to win" or "Over 2.5 goals".
• Odds: the decimal odds you're taking.
• Stake: in units. A unit is a tracking unit, not money: it shows your confidence and lets records be compared (see units).
• Reasoning: optional, but it's what followers come for.

The pick is published to your followers with a timestamp. Sports covered: football (soccer), basketball, tennis, American football, baseball and ice hockey.

2. Settlement from the final score

After the final whistle, BetsPal checks the game's final score automatically. When the score is in, the pick is compared with it and marked:

• Won if the selection came in.
• Lost if it didn't.
• Void if the game didn't produce a result that can settle the pick (see voids).

There's no button that lets a tipster mark their own pick as a winner, and nobody at BetsPal settles picks by hand. The final score decides.

3. How win rate, ROI and form are calculated

Number	Formula	What it tells you
Win rate	Won ÷ (won + lost)	How often the tipster is right. Meaningless without the odds.
Profit	Returns from winners − total staked	Units won or lost overall.
ROI	Profit ÷ total staked × 100	How much each unit staked earned. The best single measure of skill.
Form	Last results in order, as W, L or V	Recent run. Useful context, but short runs are mostly noise.

Flat-stake ROI. Leaderboard ROI assumes the same stake on every pick, one unit each. That stops a tipster from making a record look better by staking heavily on short-priced favourites that happened to win, and it lets you compare tipsters who stake differently. Returns on a winning pick are stake × decimal odds, so a 1u winner at 2.10 returns 2.10u, a profit of 1.10u.

4. A worked example

Eleven picks, one unit each:

• Settled picks: 10 (the void doesn't count), 6 won and 4 lost.
• Win rate: 6 ÷ 10 = 60%.
• Staked: 10u. Returned: 1.90 + 2.10 + 1.80 + 2.50 + 1.95 + 2.00 = 12.25u.
• Profit: 12.25 − 10 = +2.25u.
• ROI: 2.25 ÷ 10 = +22.5%.
• Form (last five, oldest first): W L V W L.

The average odds of the settled picks are 1.95, which means the break-even win rate is 1 ÷ 1.95 = 51.3%. Winning 60% at those prices is well above break-even, which is why the ROI is strongly positive. Over ten picks, though, that could easily be luck. Why sample size matters.

5. What makes a pick void

A pick is void when the game can't settle it: typically the match is cancelled, postponed or abandoned without an official result. A void pick:

• adds nothing to the units won or lost,
• doesn't count as a win or a loss in win rate or ROI,
• shows as V in form, so it stays visible in the history.

6. Tail, Fade and My slip

Every pick on BetsPal can be answered by the people who see it:

• Tail: copy the pick onto your own slip and back the tipster.
• Fade: go against the pick because you think it will lose.
• My slip: every pick you're part of, whether you posted, tailed or faded it, stays there until the game settles. A losing one turns into a torn ticket.

Tails and fades are settled from the same final score as the original pick. They're for bragging rights only: no money or stakes are involved.