OwnTheLines Rules and Bots Guide

Sports, leagues, and eligible games

Configured categories include basketball, American football, soccer, baseball, hockey, tennis, combat sports, and golf. Options include NBA, WNBA, college basketball, a separate March Madness filter, NFL, college football, multiple soccer competitions, MLB, NPB, NHL, tennis, MMA, and golf. Availability depends on supported data, the season, and league filters; a configured sport does not guarantee an open market today.

Leagues may be private or public and may have start and end dates. Join through the available public listing or a generated invite code. Public-leaderboard visibility is a separate setting, so do not assume every private league’s standings are necessarily private. Locked leagues reject new wagers. Game eligibility is checked against the league’s configured sport and date range.

The Wagers screen shows the active window: today and the next six calendar days in the application’s time zone. Placement checks the game’s start and league eligibility, but this display window is not a separate universal placement limit. March Madness has additional tournament eligibility filters.

Bankrolls, stakes, and weekly minimums

Default league values are a $100,000 initial simulated bankroll, a $5,000 per-wager maximum, and a $6,000 weekly minimum. These are defaults, not promises about every league. Stakes must be positive, within the league’s maximum, and covered by the available bankroll. Singles, parlays, and Box subsets consume the amount actually staked.

The weekly minimum measures accepted stakes, not net losses, winnings, or a required number of picks. Cancelling an eligible wager reverses its stake counters. At weekly processing, the shortfall is max(minimum - weekly stakes, 0); the deduction is capped at the available bankroll. A $6,000 minimum and $4,500 in qualifying stakes leave $1,500 unmet. With $900 available, the deduction is $900, leaving zero.

New Boxes have at most six source legs. Stored league parlay limits and market-combination rules may impose further restrictions; this guide does not promise a configurable parlay-limit control in the league form. Review the Box guide before confirming a batch.

What the six market personas select

These are mechanical choices, not forecasts or endorsements. Moneyline personas compare prices; Long Shot has no fixed +350 entry threshold. Spread and moneyline personas skip incomplete or tied comparisons. Each persona selects at most one eligible option per game from the relevant refreshed markets.

Market bots follow refreshes; Copy Cat follows humans

Market-persona runs follow successful, durably recorded odds refreshes. The configured refresh schedule is 02:00, 06:00, 09:00, 11:00, 13:00, 15:00, 17:00, 19:00, 21:00, and 23:00 UTC. A successful refresh can also be initiated outside those scheduled times. Retrying the same refresh does not place a second set for that bot; a later refresh can be a new opportunity even when a quote is unchanged.

Bots require an active, unlocked league with bots enabled and at least one human member. They skip zero-human leagues and wait when a weekly rollover is due. Remaining weekly target, bankroll, per-wager limits, eligible games, and available refresh opportunities constrain their budgets. With a zero target or no eligible choices, a bot may place nothing; the weekly minimum is not guaranteed.

Ms. Copy Cat runs separately at 16:00 UTC daily. She counts unique human supporters of eligible pending or accepted straight selections in the same league and current week. She uses currently verified market positions, including eligible totals, rather than copying top-ranked humans or following them within minutes. Bot selections and other leagues do not count as human votes.

Copy Cat ranks support, uses deterministic ties, and chooses up to three distinct games within her budget. Her daily run is idempotent. No qualifying human consensus means no fabricated pick.

Settlement and cancellation

Results processing is scheduled for 02:30, 06:30, 09:30, 11:30, 13:30, 15:30, 17:30, 19:30, 21:30, and 23:30 UTC. A game ending does not promise an immediate balance update: settlement depends on usable result data and successful processing. Unresolved outcomes can remain pending. Winning returns include stake; a loss has no return, and a refunded push has no net gain. In a parlay, push legs are removed; an all-push parlay returns the stake and any remaining loss loses the ticket.

You may cancel your own pending single or parlay within 30 minutes of placement, provided its game and every parlay leg have not started. Successful cancellation refunds the stake and reverses wagering counters. A repeat request does not create a second refund. Accepted or settled wagers are not eligible for that pending-wager cancellation path. Box subsets are checked individually.

How the OTL Power Index works

The Power Index is a descriptive 1–100 score for settled selections, not a forecast or a measure of profit. A settled single counts once. A separately placed parlay counts once. For a Box, each original single leg counts once; its automatically generated parlay combinations do not count again when the Box batch is identifiable. Pushes, cancelled wagers, and still-open wagers do not count as wins or losses. Fewer than ten graded selections show as Provisional.

The career component is the share of those selections that won. The recent component considers selections settled within the past 60 days. Each result loses half its recent weight every 30 days; wager size does not increase its influence. Recent performance can contribute at most 40% of the score, with career performance contributing at least 60%. When there are fewer than 20 effective recent decisions, the recent share is smaller. This lets the score move with new results without letting a few bets dominate it.

More precisely, each recent result has weight 0.5 raised to its age in days divided by 30. Effective sample size is the square of the sum of weights divided by the sum of squared weights. The recent share is 40% times the smaller of one and that effective size divided by 20; the remainder is the career share. The result is rounded to one decimal place and bounded to 1–100.

For example, suppose 60% of a player’s career graded selections won and their recent weighted win share is 70%. With enough recent results for the full 40% weight, the index is 60% × 60 + 40% × 70 = 64. If only five equally recent selections existed, their share would be 10% rather than 40%. Exact scores depend on when results settled, so this is an illustration, not a promised outcome.

Your Account score covers eligible selections across your leagues; a badge in a league’s standings uses that league alone. The displayed score bands are fixed numeric ranges, not rankings against other members. The calculation does not adjust for odds or whether the resulting return exceeded the stake: a high win rate can still lose simulated bankroll, and a lower win rate can be profitable at longer prices. Older Box tickets without a retained batch identity cannot be reliably identified as combinations, so they may still appear as separate historical selections.

Weekly processing and competition rollover

Weekly boundaries use the league’s configured weekday at 09:00 UTC. The scheduled processor runs daily at 09:00 UTC and processes an outstanding boundary transactionally. It records the weekly result, applies any shortfall deduction, and advances the week while preserving activity belonging after the boundary. It does not restore the initial bankroll.

Missed boundaries may require catch-up over multiple runs; ambiguous legacy accounting can require review rather than an automatic reset. Bots can pause while a boundary remains unprocessed. Separately enabled league-management automation can create new public competitions for configured periods. Those are separate leagues; existing human memberships are not automatically carried into them.

Standings describe realized simulated results, including stakes and penalties. They do not establish forecasting skill, calibration, or a real-world edge. Read How Sports Odds Work to separate payout prices from uncertain outcome probabilities.

Frequently Asked Questions