Why your bets get rejected

Why does the line disappear the moment you tap it?

You tap a price and the book says it has changed. Usually nothing is wrong with the book — the price you saw was already old.

Every screen shows a quote captured at some past instant. Between then and your bet landing sit the feed's own delay, the poll interval, the render and you. On a feed running 5.4 seconds behind, a quote displayed as 10 seconds old is really 15.4.

That changes the number that matters. Its real chance of still being available is 84%, where a screen ignoring the feed's own lag would say 89%. On a 4% edge that is the difference between 3.37% and 3.58% actually realised.

It also explains why the biggest numbers reject most often. A screen sorted by raw expected value is sorted partly by staleness: the largest edges cluster on books that moved most recently, which are the books most likely to have moved again.