Track your real edge — the CLV scorecard workflow
Most bettors know their record. Almost none know their closing line value broken out by market, by book, and by day. That second table tells you where your money is actually being made — and, more usefully, what to stop doing. This session is the operational build.
What this session covers
The seven fields to capture per bet, the arithmetic that turns them into a per-bet CLV number, how to aggregate that into a scorecard, and how to read the scorecard as an instruction. We build a small one from scratch and let it tell us which market to cut.
The seven fields
Capture these on every bet, without exception — a partial log produces a scorecard you cannot trust.
- Odds taken — American, the exact number you got.
- Book — which sportsbook filled it.
- Timestamp — to the minute. This is how you learn whether your edge is in the morning number or the late number.
- Closing line — the price at the same book when the market closed.
- Market — spread, total, moneyline, or the specific prop type.
- Stake — for weighting, and for tying CLV back to real dollars.
- Category tag — your own label for why you took it: steam follow, stale prop, injury-news reaction, model disagreement. Everybody skips this field. It eventually earns the most.
Computing CLV per bet
Convert both prices to decimal, then:
CLV % = (decimal taken ÷ decimal closing − 1) × 100
American to decimal: positive odds → 1 + O/100; negative odds → 1 + 100/(−O).
Worked once, slowly. You took an NBA points prop at +120, decimal 1 + 120/100 = 2.20. It closed at +105, decimal 2.05. CLV = (2.20 ÷ 2.05 − 1) × 100 = +7.32%. You captured a price 7.32% better than the market's final answer. Whether the prop hit is irrelevant to that number, which is exactly why the number is useful.
A more precise variant devigs both sides of the closing market and compares implied probabilities rather than raw prices — worth doing where vig sits unevenly on a lopsided market. For day-to-day scorecarding, the price-ratio version is accurate enough and far faster.
A worked scorecard
Eight bets, one week:
| Market | Book | Taken | Closed | CLV % | Tag |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NFL spread | DK | −105 | −115 | +4.43% | Model disagreement |
| NBA points prop | FD | +120 | +105 | +7.32% | Stale prop |
| NHL puck line | MGM | −140 | −135 | −1.52% | Steam follow |
| MLB total | Caesars | −110 | −120 | +4.13% | Weather |
| NBA rebounds prop | DK | −115 | −130 | +5.67% | Injury news |
| NFL moneyline | FD | +160 | +175 | −5.45% | Gut read |
| CBB total | MGM | −108 | −112 | +1.75% | Model disagreement |
| NBA assists prop | Caesars | +105 | −105 | +5.00% | Injury news |
Overall: +2.67% average CLV across 8 bets. That is a real, healthy number.
Now the part that matters — the same eight rows, aggregated two ways.
By market type:
| Bucket | Bets | Average CLV |
|---|---|---|
| Props | 3 | +6.00% |
| Totals | 2 | +2.94% |
| Sides (spread, puck line, moneyline) | 3 | −0.85% |
By book:
| Book | Bets | Average CLV |
|---|---|---|
| DK | 2 | +5.05% |
| Caesars | 2 | +4.57% |
| FD | 2 | +0.93% |
| MGM | 2 | +0.11% |
The headline said "you are a +2.67% bettor." The breakout says something far more specific: you are a prop bettor with a side-market habit that is quietly draining the average.
Aggregations worth running
Once the seven fields are logged, slice the same data by:
- Market type — almost always the highest-yield cut. Edges are market-specific.
- Book — consistently negative CLV at one book usually means you are late to its number, or its close is sharper than the books you shop against.
- Sport — most bettors have one sport where they are genuinely good and two where they are entertained.
- Day of week and time of day — where the timestamp field earns its keep. Many members find their morning numbers hold and their late-night numbers do not.
- Category tag — steam follows versus gut reads. Uncomfortable and useful at the same time.
What the scorecard tells you to stop
A scorecard is only worth building if you act on it, and the instruction is usually subtraction.
- Any bucket with persistently negative CLV: stop. Not "size down," not "work on it." The sides bucket above at −0.85% is a leak dragging on a genuinely strong prop game.
- Any tag that only exists because a bet was fun: stop. "Gut read" at −5.45% is not a strategy, and it is the row most likely to show up on a night you are already stuck.
- Any book at flat-to-negative CLV: stop shopping there first. Route volume to the books where you consistently catch a better number.
- Any market where CLV used to be positive and has drifted to zero: stop and diagnose. That is edge decay, not variance.
Concentration beats breadth. The scorecard almost never tells you to add a market. It tells you which three things you should have been doing all along.
When does a scorecard number mean something?
Faster than a win rate does — but not instantly. The standard error of your average CLV is your per-bet CLV scatter divided by the square root of your bet count. Say your per-bet CLV varies by about 3 percentage points: at 100 bets the standard error is 0.30 points, so a +2.7% average sits many times outside the noise. A win rate at that sample still tells you nothing.
Practical thresholds: treat an overall CLV figure as meaningful around 100 logged bets, and a per-bucket figure around 50 bets in that bucket. Below that you are building a habit, not reading a verdict.
Build it once and the upkeep is trivial: seven columns for the fields, two more holding the decimal conversions, and a tenth carrying the CLV formula so every row grades itself the moment you fill in the close. Two minutes a night at the end of a session — which removes the only real reason people abandon this workflow, namely the belief that it is a project rather than a habit.
What the live session adds
- A live screen-share build of a scorecard from a blank sheet, including the decimal-conversion formulas.
- Reading two anonymized member scorecards on air and calling the stop-doing list out loud.
- Q&A on tagging schemes — how granular to go before tags stop being useful.
- A walkthrough of the pivot that turns a flat sheet of bets into the by-market and by-book cuts above, in about a minute.
Session status: Replays post to this page after each live run. The next live date is announced in Discord and in the weekly Sharp Report.