How odds work
Where the Odds Come From
Booki does not set your lines. It buys them from a data provider that aggregates prices from real sportsbooks, and shows them to your members unchanged. Here is what that means in practice.
Booki takes no position in your book. It does not set lines, does not adjust them for individual members, does not take the other side of anyone’s pick, and does not make money when a member loses. Booki charges you a flat subscription and nothing else. Your book’s outcome is entirely between you and your members.
Where the numbers come from
Odds are bought from a commercial data provider that collects prices from licensed US sportsbooks and publishes a consensus. They are the same numbers a mainstream betting app would show, arriving through the same kind of feed.
Nobody at Booki types in a line, and there is no setting anywhere that shades a price. If you want to run different numbers than the market, that is not something Booki currently supports.
When a game becomes bettable
Games open for betting roughly 48 hours before they start. Before that they are not shown, because a line that far out moves constantly and is rarely useful.
Futures are the exception. Season-long markets — championship winners and similar — stay open for months, because that is the entire point of them.
How often prices update
Not every game refreshes at the same rate. Fetching odds costs money, so the effort goes where lines actually move.
Every game inside the window is re-priced twice a day. On top of that, once a game has picks on it, it is watched much more closely — a marquee game about to start is re-priced every half hour, and one a day or two out every couple of hours. Futures update once a day, since they drift over weeks rather than minutes.
The practical consequence: a line can trail the live market. Minutes on a busy game near kickoff, but potentially several hours on a game nobody has bet yet. Your members are betting a recent price, not a live one — and if a line looks out of date on a quiet game, it may well be.
Why a finished game shows no odds
Once a game ends, its odds are deleted. This looks alarming and is completely safe, because every pick stores its own price at the moment it was placed.
When a member takes a team at −140, that number is copied onto their pick and never changes, even if the line moves to −165 an hour later. Grading uses the final score and the price saved on the pick — it never looks up the old market. A settled pick from three months ago shows exactly what it always showed.
Why a game sometimes shows no price
Almost always it is simply more than 48 hours away, and it will have a price when it gets closer.
A game starting today with no price is a genuine fault, not expected behaviour. If you see that, it is worth reporting — it means something did not sync.
What this means for you
You are not responsible for pricing your book, and you also cannot tilt it. The lines your members see are the market’s lines. Your edge, if you want one, comes from the limits you set and who you invite — not from the numbers.