Como won at Marassi and the first loss arrived, as promised, without warning. Tonight the book sells the shortest price it has sold since the reset.

Como won at Marassi. The draw that carried twenty-eight per cent of the board did not arrive, Genoa did not hold their own ground, and the lay cost €840 — the first loss of the new book, four positions in. The ledger reads three and one, plus €2,100 on €4,090 of risk, a return of fifty-one per cent. That number has already halved from yesterday’s ninety, which is the useful thing about it: on a sample this small every result moves the line by tens of points, and anyone reading a percentage off four matches is reading noise.

Tonight, Inter against Napoli at San Siro — the shortest price this book has laid since the reset, and by some distance the largest market it has stepped into. The exchange has Inter at 1.73: €730 at risk to collect €980, which is also the best ratio the new ledger has been offered. Strip the margin from the board — 1.72 Inter, 3.9 the draw, 5.9 Napoli — and the fair line reads 57.7% / 25.5% / 16.8%. Our break-even needs Inter to win less than 57.3%. Four tenths of a point, the smallest gap of the five positions so far, and still on the wrong side of it.

What is being sold here is not really Napoli’s chances — the market gives them one night in six — but the assumption that a fixture between the last two champions of this league resolves cleanly. A quarter of the probability sits on the draw, and matches of this weight have a habit of finishing 1-1 with both sides deciding on the hour that a point is acceptable. That is the argument, and it is a soft one: the exchange has priced the same thought and charged us the commission for agreeing with it. Four positions in, three wins and a loss, and nothing on this page yet distinguishable from a coin.