Taken apart fill by fill, the lifetime winners fall cleanly into three shapes with completely different capital and capability requirements. The one with the strongest evidence is also the plainest and least infrastructure-dependent. The one that most resembles "professional market making" has the weakest.
| B · Pregame value holding | A · In-play two-sided | C · Pregame semi-making | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What they do | pick a side before kickoff, hold to settlement | high-frequency two-sided after kickoff | quote both sides pregame |
| Two-sided rate | 0–28% (barely pairs) | 43–76% | 32–42% |
| Per-share margin | +12.5 to +20.8¢ | +4 to +16¢ | −3.0 / −2.4¢ |
| Earns from | being more accurate | speed and volume | rebates |
| Requires | odds data and judgement | live scores, low latency, size | screen time |
| Evidence | strongest | strong | weakest |
The signature is remarkably consistent: two-sided rate near zero (they do not pair, and do not want to), pregame dominant, buy and hold with sales near zero.
That sentence is the entry's key inference: the magnitude of a margin is itself a fingerprint. Fractions of a cent means market making; ten-plus cents means judgement. Anyone claiming to "earn the spread" while showing double-digit-cent margins is describing something other than spread.
| Two sub-shapes | Detail |
|---|---|
| Concentrated | one wallet made $1.75M across 24 tennis boards in 12 days (+15.6% margin) |
| Broad | another covered 986 boards in 19 days |
Both work, which says the path does not depend on a particular betting cadence. It depends on the underlying ability: picking the underpriced side.
| Signature | Value |
|---|---|
| In-play share of volume | 72–88% |
| Two-sided rate | 43–76% |
| Per-share margin | +4 to +16¢ (thin) |
| Volume | enormous (one did $179k in 0.4 days) |
One wallet in this group has a lifetime of $1,685k and a pregame per-share margin of −18.9¢ — meaning even it loses money before kickoff, with every cent of profit made after.
Which shows A and B are not two versions of one capability but two different businesses. Being good at one implies nothing about the other.
The barrier is in the requirements row: live score and event feeds, low latency, and size. It is a latency race, and individuals do not have a seat in one.
This is the shape that most resembles "market making on a prediction venue": quote both sides before kickoff, wait to be filled, earn spread and rebates. It sounds the most professional and has the weakest evidence:
| Finding | Value |
|---|---|
| This group's pregame trading EV | −3.0¢ / −2.4¢ (negative) |
| How they break even | on rebates |
| And note | these were selected from the lifetime winners |
A wallet eighth on the maker-rebate table with $254k collected is down $3,911,925 lifetime; another "model maker" with exact rebate reconciliation is down $254,149. Full account in profiling the winners.
This is the only archetype where the winners barely break even and the losers lose enormously.
I tested pregame two-sided quoting myself and found a pair rate near zero and almost no fills. My first assumption was queue position. Taking the winners apart revealed the real reason, and it is about the nature of the flow:
Market making needs two-way flow: someone buying, someone selling, you earning the middle. Pregame boards mainly have a group of people all pushing the same way into the side they think is cheap.
It was not that I could not get to the front of the queue. There simply was not enough two-way flow to pair against. That conclusion applies to anyone considering pregame market making — it is market structure, not an execution problem.
| Conclusion | Note |
|---|---|
| Margin magnitude is a fingerprint | fractions of a cent = making; ten-plus cents = judgement. A mismatch means someone has mislabelled what they do |
| Not one winner runs pregame passive two-sided as their engine | zero of fifteen |
| Rebate farming is a losers' path | rebates are a consolation prize, not a business model |
The archetype with the strongest evidence is the plainest one: pick a side before kickoff, hold to settlement, never pair at all. It runs on judgement rather than infrastructure — while the one that most resembles "professional market making" has winners barely breaking even and losers on the leaderboard for the wrong reasons.