Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How do I convert to single units?

A: Divide the # of units in wagertracker by 100, to get "single unit style" scoring.

Q: How long has wagertracker been around?

A: Wagertracker was started in or around 2000. It has traditions as a service oriented site. In mid 2006, the site was sold to a Canadian investor group, who changed the business model of the site in order to allow for free contests, which in turn, makes the site applicable to a much larger audience.

Q: How does the "streak-o-meter" work?

A: The top 5 point movers over the course of the last week appear in the streak-o-meter.

Q: How come the team experts changed after the outcome of the game?

A: Early in the season, the experts for purposes of computing expert consensus can be volatile, since standings within the picks for or against a particular team can change rapidly. As the season goes on, and experts are established, there should be less volatility as far as "who is considered an expert", and therefore, more consistency.

Q: How come in college football the units won look different?

A: In college football, because some moneylines are very high (e.g. -16000 in some very lopsided games), we standardize risk, instead of standardizing the amount won. Allowing players to risk 16000 to win 100 in the contest has too much of an unbalancing effect.

Q: When are we going to know how much we can win in the contests?

A: Generally, before the season starts, we set policies for the contest on any given sport.

Q: Where is the option to hide my picks until the game starts?

A: While we realize a number of wagertracker users in the past ran professional services, and used wagertracker for monitoring, we are going in a slightly new direction. Wagertracker will be, first and foremost, a service that allows you to compete with other sports bettors in contests. While we welcome services to post their picks, we can understand why you might not, if you run a pay service. This is, of course, subject to change during the beta testing phase of the site, but the chance of this policy changing is fairly low as of this writing (7/23)

Q: WTF is RSS?

A: RSS stands for "Really Simply Syndication". It allows you to track wagers from others via means other than directly visiting wagertracker. RSS is what allows us to have "Add to Google" and "Add to MyYahoo" buttons.

Q: And RSI? Now I am really confussed!

A: RSI stands for Relative Strength Index. It tests statistical meaningfulness of a players "sides" picks. The higher the RSI, the more the picks probably have to do with skill, and the less they are approximatley the same results you get from flipping a coin. In the absence of skill, RSI will tend to zero. Someone with a strong negative RSI is a good candidate for fading, so don't write it off.

Q: I am in last place, why should I continue playing?

A: There are prizes for last place as well as first place in a given seasonwide contest. Think of it as not only a consolation prize of sorts, but as establishing a record of someone whose picks would be good to bet against.

Q: How come you seem like a smart ass when you write your ads sometimes?

A: Anyone can put up a bunch of banners, graphics, and stuff that bombards your eye, and makes it look like a site you are not supposed to be at when you are at work. We strive for an ad strategy that is more colorful in it's attitude rather than it's visual appearance. This makes it easier to use at work, but means I get to be a smart ass when I write the ads. We try to have fun with them, and hope you might.

Q: Who pays out when someone wins a contest?

A: We do. That is why you should visit our sponsors and open accounts, because the more people do that, the bigger prizes can be. That said, we certainly do not require that the winner do anything but use the site and make picks. You can freeload all day if you want to, and if you win, heck, at least you let us tell the story of just how studly you are to other users of the site on our homepage.

Q: It would be really cool if the site did X. Can you make it happen?

A: In the first week of the site being opened, we added about a dozen features at user's requests. We expect to continue that tradition to the extent possible. Email me at wagertracker@gmail.com - and you will probably get a personal response, and if the feature is reasonable (and does not conflict with another feature we already have, or our business plan) - we will probably get it in at some point.