Are Betting Prediction Apps Accurate?

Ours was not as accurate as it said, and you can see by how much. On our MLB board this season, home run reads said about a 34% chance on average. 19 in 100 homered, and 81 did not. Since September 10 the board has shown lowered numbers, and for their first two weeks those landed about where they said. Below is everything we graded, where it ran high, and the test you can run on any app.

Measured September 24, 2026, on 73,272 graded MLB reads from April 14 to September 23, 2026, every one written before its game started.

What a percentage is supposed to mean

A 30% chance means that out of 100 reads like it, about 30 land and 70 miss. So a single 30% read that misses was not wrong. It did what 30% does most of the time.

That means you cannot judge a prediction app by one pick, or by a week. You judge it by the group. Collect every read it gave about 30%, count how many landed, and compare. Then do the same at 40%, 50%, 60%. If the counts match the percentages, the app’s numbers mean what they say. Statisticians call that being well calibrated. If the counts come in lower, the app is overstating, and you are being shown more confidence than it has earned.

Almost no betting app publishes that table. Here is ours.

What we graded

Every read our model writes is stored with its percentage, the line, the side and the time it was written, and it is settled against the official box score after the game. For this page we kept only reads written before their team’s scheduled first pitch: 73,272 of them, across four MLB player prop markets and two smaller ones, from April 14 to September 23, 2026.

We split them two ways, because they answer two different questions. The board is the top of each day’s slate, the reads you were actually shown. Every hitter scored adds the rest of the players the model rated those same days, most of whom nobody saw. The board tells you what we told people. Every hitter scored tells you about the model.

On the board, the numbers ran high

Read the first row as a frequency. The board’s home run reads said about 34 in 100. About 19 in 100 homered, and 81 did not. On one or more hits, it said about 71 and 63 landed, so 37 did not. Every market on the board came in lower than it said, by 7 to 16 points.

On ET Parlays’ MLB board, home run reads stated about a 34% chance on average, and 19 in 100 homered, across 2,825 reads from April 14 to September 23, 2026.

Worse, inside the board a higher number barely meant anything. The board is the top of the slate, so the model was choosing its biggest numbers, and choosing the biggest numbers from a list of estimates mostly chooses the estimates that came out too high. That is called the winner’s curse, and it is why the reads people saw were the most overstated reads we wrote.

Across every hitter: close at the bottom, high at the top

Take the whole pool and a clearer picture shows up. At the low end the model was close. At the high end it overstated, more the higher it went.

• Home runs under 15% landed within about a point of what they said. When the model said 7.2%, 7.4% homered, across 3,029 reads.
• Home runs said 40% or more on 2,120 reads, and about 21 in 100 homered.
• One or more hits was close up to about 60%. Above that, it stopped climbing: reads that said 72%, 77% and 81% all landed about 62%.
• Where the overstatement starts depends on the market: home runs from about 20%, total bases from about 45%, hits plus runs plus RBIs from about 55%, one or more hits from about 65%.

When ET Parlays’ model said a hitter had about a 77% chance of a hit, 62 in 100 got one, across 1,157 reads in the 2026 MLB season through September 23.

Does a higher number mean anything at all?

Yes, a little. Take one hitter who got a hit and one who did not, from any day this season. The model gave the one who did the higher number 54 times in 100. A coin flip gets 50. On home runs it was 59 in 100. So the ordering is real, and modest.

Here is the less flattering way to say the same thing. If we had given every hitter that market’s season average, the same number for everyone, those numbers would have scored slightly better than the model’s own, in all four markets. Nobody knows the season average in advance, so that is a yardstick, not a rival. But it tells you the model’s overconfidence cost more than its sorting earned.

What we changed, and what happened next

On September 10 we put a step between the model and every hitter market you see. It lowers each number to what the last sixty days of this record support. It never raises one. The model underneath did not change.

Across every hitter scored over the same days, 7,878 reads, the shown numbers missed by about 2 points on average, against 4.5 to 9.6 points for the model’s own. Each board row above carries about 5 to 7 points of uncertainty either way at these sizes, and two weeks is a short window.

And the part we would rather you hear from us: the numbers got closer by getting smaller, not by getting smarter. Shown home run numbers now top out around 20%. The model sorts exactly as well as it did before. What changed is that it no longer tells you it is more sure than it has been.

Since ET Parlays started lowering its displayed MLB prop numbers on September 10, 2026, they missed by about 2 points on average across 7,878 graded reads in their first two weeks.

What this does not mean

• It does not mean the reads are useless. Higher numbers do land more often across the pool, and the numbers you see now say roughly what happens.
• It does not mean anyone beat the sportsbook. We checked on September 9: inside matched probability bands, the sportsbook’s forecast beat ours in seven of nine markets.
• It is not a win rate. A read that says 20% and lands 20 times in 100 is right. Counting its 80 misses as losses reads it wrong.

Three questions to ask any app

You do not need to trust us, or anyone, to use this. Ask any prediction app for three things before you pay it.

• 1. Show me what your numbers said next to how often they landed. Grouped by percentage, one market at a time. One blended accuracy number across every market hides more than it shows.
• 2. Is every miss in it, and was every read written before the game? A record that loses the misses, or counts picks written after kickoff, is not a record. We found 11,828 of our own hitter reads written after first pitch and took them out; here is what happened.
• 3. How many reads is each number built on? A band built on 40 reads can swing 10 points by chance. A number with no count beside it is not evidence yet.

Where this stops being true

• This is MLB only. We do not have an NFL table like this yet.
• About one in six reads on games already played has no grade, mostly players who never got into the game. We checked the part that could hide losses, the players who did play, and it did not.
• The after-the-change numbers cover two weeks. We will extend them every month.
• We do not store the price a bet closed at, so we cannot tell you whether our reads beat the closing line.

This is research and education, not betting advice. Bet only what you can afford to lose, keep it 21+, and treat every ticket as entertainment first. If it has stopped being that, there is help and it is free: responsible gambling resources.

Keep going: How ET Parlays works, and where it is wrong · Is a losing streak normal? · Why do parlays always lose? · All Learn articles

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