Editorial Policy

By Alex Thornton · author of the MIT-licensed teachersbettextbook library · Last reviewed 24 July 2026

Teacher’s Bet publishes calculations, never picks. It carries no affiliate links, no paid placement and no sponsored content, and it makes money from subscriptions alone. One named person writes every page and is accountable for every number on it. This page states the rules so there is something to hold the site to.

1. No picks. Not ever.

No page on this site says to place a bet, or which side to take, or when. There are no plays, no leans, no units, no card, no Discord, no newsletter of selections. That is not a phase before monetisation arrives; it is the product boundary, and a page that crossed it would be pulled.

The reason is partly legal and mostly structural. An analytics tool that starts issuing selections becomes a tipster service, and a tipster service is judged by a record it has every incentive to launder. A calculator is judged by whether its arithmetic is right — which anyone can check, which is the only claim this site actually makes.

2. Outputs are calculations, not advice

Every number published here is arithmetic on inputs a reader supplied or on posted market prices, and it is framed as arithmetic. “At these inputs the expected value is −1¢ per dollar” is a statement about the numbers. “Skip this one” is advice, and it does not appear.

Concretely, in the copy:

• No imperatives about wagering. Findings are stated as properties of the arithmetic, not as instructions to the reader.
• No outcome claims. Copy that promises profit or certainty is banned outright, including in headlines, metadata and marketing. Promises of that kind are the most common enforcement magnet in this category, and the site does not go near them.
• No implied certainty from a model. A fair line is an estimate with a confidence read and a venue count attached, and it is presented that way.
• The honest zero. When the inputs contain no edge, the printed answer is $0. It is never rounded up into something that looks actionable.

Nothing on this site is legal, tax, financial or investment advice.

3. No affiliate links. No paid placement.

As of the last-reviewed date above, there are zero affiliate links, referral codes, tracked outbound sportsbook links, commission arrangements, sponsored articles and paid placements on this site. No venue, book or exchange has paid for a mention, a ranking or a position in any list, and none can.

That matters most where the money would bite hardest. The fair line is built from every qualifying venue by a published method; a venue’s weight comes from its measured price behaviour and a published cold-start prior, never from a commercial relationship. No venue has ever paid for weight, a mention or a ranking, and none can. A tool that ranks books while earning a commission per signup has an interest in the ranking. This one has no such interest to declare, because there is nothing to declare.

If that ever changes, the disclosure comes first: stated at the top of the page carrying the link, before the link, in plain language, and noted here with the date. A disclosure buried in a footer is not a disclosure.

4. Who writes this

Alex Thornton, in Syracuse, New York. One person writes the pages, writes the math, and ships the deploys.

There is no editorial board. There is no staff, no panel of experts, no anonymous “our team of analysts,” and no reviewer credential to cite — and no page on this site pretends otherwise. Invented review boards are common in this category and they are a lie about accountability. Here the accountability is one name and one address: alex@teachersbet.com, which reaches him directly.

Every article and reference page carries a byline naming that person and linking to the about page, which says who he is and what he has actually built.

5. How a page gets written and checked

With no review board, the check has to be reproducibility rather than authority. Four things stand in for a second pair of eyes:

1. The math is published. The odds conversions, all three de-vig methods, Kelly sizing and the arbitrage split ship as teachersbettextbook, an MIT-licensed Python library on PyPI. A reader can install it and reproduce any number on the site without asking permission. That is the review process working in public.
2. Every worked example is recomputed before it ships. Numbers in an article are produced by running the library, not typed from memory. An example that disagrees with the library is a bug in the article.
3. The two implementations are tested against each other. The math exists twice — the Python library, and the JavaScript the browser and the live board run — and both are tested against a shared set of golden values. A page and the app cannot quietly drift apart.
4. Every result has a working “show the work” path. If a calculation cannot be derived step by step for the reader, it does not ship. That rule kills features; it has, and it will again.

The full specification of how a fair line is computed — every estimator, every formula, and the exact conditions under which the site publishes nothing at all — is on the methodology page.

6. Dates mean something

Every article and reference page carries a last-reviewed date in its byline, and that date is the same string as the dateModified in the page’s structured data. They are written together, so the visible date and the machine-readable one say the same thing.

A date changes when the page changes. Re-stamping an untouched page with today’s date to look fresh in a search result is a practice this site does not use. If the date moved, something on the page moved.

7. Sources and citations

• Methods are cited to the primary literature — author, year, journal, volume, pages — so a claim can be traced to the paper that made it rather than to a blog that repeated it.
• Fee schedules and venue rules are quoted from the venue’s own published schedule, with the revision dated, because they change.
• Market data comes from first-party licensed APIs only. Nothing on this site is scraped, and no resold or scraped feed is purchased. That constraint has cost the site an easier architecture; it stands anyway.
• Where a claim rests on the site’s own data, the page says so and describes the sample, rather than presenting an in-house measurement as though it were an outside finding.
• Simulations are labelled as simulations, with their inputs, their sample size, and a note that they illustrate the mathematics rather than predict anything.

8. What is never published

• Ratings, reviews, testimonials and user counts. None of them would be real. The site’s structured data carries no aggregateRating and no Review markup for the same reason.
• Sportsbook rankings and “top books” lists. These are the standard vehicle for affiliate revenue in this category, and they are exactly the thing rule 3 exists to keep off the site.
• Fabricated credentials, staff, offices or history. If it is not true today, it does not appear, in copy or in structured data.
• Screenshots of winning slips, profit graphs and bankroll receipts. They prove nothing and sell everything.
• Imagery placing wagering in a school setting. The site’s look is a chalkboard and a teacher at the front of a room; it stays adult, with no children and no classrooms, in line with the advertising rules that apply in this category.

9. When the site publishes nothing

The strongest editorial rule here is the one that removes a number instead of adding one. Where the data cannot support a figure, the figure is withheld and the reason is shown: a stale quote is displayed with its timestamps but never flagged as an edge; an implausibly large computed edge is treated as a broken feed and filtered rather than surfaced. Fewer than two qualifying venues means no leave-one-out benchmark is computed, and moving that refusal onto the published board — so a single-venue market prints no consensus at all rather than a labelled one — is in flight rather than done. The conditions are enumerated on the methodology page.

A tool that always has something to show is optimising for engagement. This one is optimised for being right, which sometimes means an empty row.

10. Corrections

A wrong number on a math site is a broken product, not a typo. The corrections process, stated so it can be held to:

1. Report it to alex@teachersbet.com with the page URL, the inputs used and the result expected. It is the highest-priority mail this site receives, and the reporting channels are listed on the contact page.
2. The report is reproduced first — against the published library, not against the site’s own output. If the two disagree, that disagreement is itself the bug.
3. If the page is wrong it is fixed and redeployed, and the last-reviewed date changes to the day the fix went live.
4. A correction that changes a number or a method gets a dated correction note on the page itself. Typos, broken links and wording fixes do not — a correction notice that fires on every comma edit teaches readers to ignore it.
5. Nothing is quietly deleted. If a claim turns out to be wrong, the page says so rather than the sentence vanishing.

11. Where the site declines to have an opinion

Some questions in this area are genuinely unsettled, and the honest move is to say so rather than resolve them in copy for the sake of a confident sentence.

• The regulatory status of prediction markets is developing and is not uniform across venues or states. Pages describe how a market and its fees work; they do not assert what is permitted where.
• Washington State. RCW 9.46.240 addresses the internet transmission of gambling information in terms this site treats as an open question rather than a settled one, and it is handled by a configurable geographic restriction rather than by a confident paragraph.
• Tax treatment of betting or event-contract results is not addressed on this site at all.

Where counsel has not confirmed a position, no page asserts one. Availability and account terms are covered on the terms page.

12. Responsible gambling in the copy

Every page carries the same footer: this is an analytics tool, not a sportsbook; it takes no wagers and holds no funds; it is for informational and entertainment purposes; it is intended for people of legal betting age; and the helplines are printed rather than linked out of sight. Nothing on this site is written to make wagering look easy, safe or inevitable, and no copy frames a calculator as a way to win. Support resources are on the responsible gambling page.

13. How the site makes money

Subscriptions, and nothing else. The free tier — every calculator, the whole Learn course and the formula sheet — is free permanently and is not a trial. The odds board is free too, on a two-hour delay; removing that delay is what the paid tier buys today, and streamed exchange data and stored history are what it will buy when they ship. It does not buy a formula, a ranking or a pick. Prices, renewal terms and the cancellation path are on the pricing page in plain language.

No advertising is sold on this site, and no third-party ad network runs on it.

14. Changes to this policy

This page carries its own last-reviewed date, and a material change to the rules above moves that date and is described on the page rather than slipped in. The rules that would most obviously be tempting to soften — no picks, no affiliate links, no fabricated credentials — are the ones this page exists to make expensive to break.