Two positions, two ways to be paid, and both of them arrived. The book is at plus €1,960 and neither number will hold.

Sassuolo and Frosinone finished level and the lay was paid €980 against €940 of liability. That makes two from two, plus €1,960 across €2,300 of risk, and — more usefully than the euros — one of each kind of win. Monday came from an outright upset at the Tardini, Wednesday from a draw at the Mapei. Those are the two doors this position has, and in the previous book, across ten attempts, only one of them ever opened. Two matches is not evidence of anything. It is, at least, a demonstration of the mechanism.

Tonight the exchange offers Real Sociedad at 1.95 to lay against Celta Vigo at the Reale Arena: €950 at risk to collect €980. It is the third position in three days priced within a hundredth of even money, which is coincidence rather than method. Strip the margin from the board — 1.94 the home side, 3.8 the draw, 4.4 Celta — and the fair line reads 51.2% / 26.2% / 22.6%. Our break-even needs Real Sociedad to win less than 50.8%, and the market says 51.2%. Four tenths of a point against us. As ever, that number is the commission, and as ever it is the honest description of what this position is: a coin flip with a fee.

One thing worth stating while the ledger is green, because it is easier to say now than after the first loss. Plus €1,960 on two positions is not a result, it is a sample of two, and the arithmetic underneath it has not changed since the day the book started: every position filed has carried a small negative expectation on the exchange’s own fair line, tonight’s included, at about €9 per €1,000. Two wins in a row are exactly what a fair coin does one time in four. The reason the ledger prints the number anyway — in the green weeks as in the red ones — is that the only way to find out whether any of this is real is to run it long enough for the noise to stop mattering. Three positions in, we are nowhere near that.