How to read the coupon
Every number on this site carries a probability and a price. This page explains where both come from, what they can tell you, and — just as important — what they cannot.
What counts as a draw
On the pools coupon a draw is any match that finishes level: 0–0, 1–1, 2–2 and so on. This site gives every match a single draw figure, the market's chance of that match finishing level, and ranks the whole coupon by it. Two matches can both look like 1–0 games on paper while the market rates one of them a draw several points more likely, and that difference is what the ranking is for.
Where the probability comes from
Bookmakers publish prices, not probabilities. A draw quoted at 4.00 implies a one-in-four chance — 1 divided by 4.00 is 0.25. Do that for home, draw and away on the same match and the three figures add up to more than 100%. The excess is the bookmaker's margin, and it is how they make money.
We remove it. Each bookmaker's three prices are rescaled so they sum to exactly 100%, which strips that bookmaker's margin from their own numbers. Then we average across every bookmaker quoting the match. The result is closer to what the market collectively believes than any single price on any single site.
How the numbers are shaded
Draw probabilities on a single coupon sit in a narrow range, usually between the low teens and the high twenties, so fixed cut-offs would leave most numbers the same colour. Instead the numbers are ranked each week: the twelve strongest are shaded darkest (twelve is close to the number of draws a typical coupon produces), the next eighteen lighter, and the rest plain. The key under the board prints the actual percentages for that week.
Some matches are quoted by too few bookmakers to form a consensus, or not at all. They stay on the coupon, marked as not quoted, rather than being dropped.
Reading a row
The large figure is the coupon number, because that is how the coupon is actually played. Next to it sits the chance of a draw, then the best draw price we can find and the bookmaker offering it. The bar shows how that number compares with the strongest on the same coupon — it is relative to the week, not an absolute scale.
Numbers shaded green are the ones the market rates most highly this week. Numbers shown plain were quoted by too few bookmakers to form a consensus, or not quoted at all. Those still appear. Hiding them would make the coupon look more certain than it is.
What these numbers cannot do
A 28% draw chance is among the strongest numbers on a typical coupon. It still fails roughly seven times in ten. That is not a flaw in the figure — it is what 28% means. Football draws are genuinely hard to predict, which is exactly why pools pay what they do.
Some weeks the market barely separates the coupon at all: thirty numbers within two percentage points of each other. When that happens the page says so rather than presenting a confident shortlist, because ranking 20% above 19% implies a precision nobody has.
We publish our accuracy in full on the record, including the weeks the market got it wrong. Any site that shows you only its winners is showing you a selection.
Where the data comes from
Prices are collected from participating bookmakers throughout the week and the last price before kick-off is kept permanently. That means an archived week shows what was genuinely known beforehand, not a number adjusted afterwards. Fixtures, results and the coupon itself come from the pools coupon as published.
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