Prices on a game move from the day they open until kickoff. The last price before the game starts is the closing price. It is the single most useful number in sports betting, and it costs nothing to look at.

When a sportsbook opens a game, it makes a first guess. Then the money and the news arrive. A starting quarterback is ruled out. Heavy money comes in on one side. Bettors who know more than the opening price push it toward what they think is true.

By kickoff, the price has absorbed days of money from people who study the game for a living, plus every bit of news. The pros' price at the close is the sharpest public estimate of the true chance. It is not perfect, but we have not found a better one.

Compare the break-even chance of the price you took with the fair chance at the close. If the close says 53.0% and you took a price with a break-even of 51.2% (-105), your price beat the close by 1.8 points. If the closing price is right, that bet was worth about +3.5 cents per dollar. If you took -125, with a break-even of 55.6%, you were 2.6 points behind it.

A win-loss record depends on how each game ends, and that is mostly luck over a small sample. The closing price does not depend on how any one game ends. A bettor or tout who keeps getting better prices than the close is probably seeing something early. A few such bets mean little, and hundreds mean a lot more.

Beating the close once is not skill. A price that beats the close is not a promise of profit either, because any single game can go either way and sportsbooks can limit bettors who keep winning. And the closing price is the best guide we have, not the truth.

We test our own grades against the closing price and publish the totals on the Our results page, updated every NFL weekend. In plain terms: in our results, the better the KYT grade, the better the price held up against the close.

For entertainment and education. Nothing here predicts results or recommends a bet.