The free-bet guide asked for prices and got a season-preview packet. That is not a clever setup. It is the state of the evidence. The current payload contains contract and schedule facts, but no comparable sportsbook lines. Without those lines, the guide’s conversion math was not re-validated in this run.
The distinction matters. A free-bet conversion decision depends on the exact promotion rules and current prices available at more than one shop. A player contract or strength-of-schedule figure may be true and still be useless for that calculation. The honest update is therefore an empty market result, not a manufactured opportunity.
The payload contains real facts in the wrong category
Provenance tier: pundit mention; source table: mentions. De’Von Achane’s extension was described as a four-year, $64 million deal . That is a contract fact. It does not supply a spread, moneyline, promotion restriction, or hedge price.
Provenance tier: pundit mention; source table: mentions. The same payload described Chicago’s strength of schedule as .550 and Miami’s as .542, with Chicago ranked toughest and Miami second . Those figures belong in a season-preview discussion. They do not tell us whether a free-bet offer can be converted efficiently today.
The team records are context, not betting performance
Provenance tier: pundit mention; source table: mentions. Dallas was described as finishing 12–5 in the 2022 regular season, a 17-game team record . San Francisco was described as finishing 6–11 in the 2024 regular season and 12–5 in the 2025 regular season, with 17 games in each window .
Those are straight-up team records, not ATS records, conversion rates, or returns. They are preserved because the source rows contain them, but they do no work in a free-bet calculation. Calling them evidence for a conversion edge would be category fraud.
What the guide actually needs
A useful rebuild needs comparable live prices for the same event, the promotion’s stake-return rules, and enough market depth to distinguish a stale quote from a real alternative. Then the EV tool can compare outcomes without pretending a schedule fact is an odds input.
None of those fields appears in this payload. That means this article cannot confirm that a conversion opportunity exists, cannot say one disappeared, and cannot publish a return figure. “No applicable rows” is the result.
Why the empty result is useful
Evidence systems fail when they reward any number merely for being a number. The four-year contract term is sourced. The schedule figures are sourced. The team records are sourced and their windows are explicit. They still do not answer the assigned question.
Keeping those facts in their lane protects the guide from a common content trick: a paragraph full of precise figures that creates authority without supplying the required input. The right standard is not “did the payload contain numbers?” It is “did the payload contain the numbers the decision needs?” Here, it did not.
The provenance tier makes that boundary auditable. These are pundit-mention rows, not live pregame prices. A reader can see why the facts were retained and why they were barred from the calculation. The content is not rejecting the source; it is refusing to ask the source a question it cannot answer.
The conversion contract is stricter than it looks
A usable comparison must describe the same event, side, market, and settlement rules at roughly the same decision time. A free bet whose stake is not returned behaves differently from cash. A promotion restricted to selected markets behaves differently from an unrestricted credit. Those terms are not footnotes; they define the payoff being compared.
That is why a broad statement such as “find disagreement” is not enough. The odds rows must be matched, the promotion rules must be explicit, and the available cash side must remain executable. Otherwise the conversion estimate is a paper result built from prices the bettor could not actually combine.
What not to infer from the schedule rows
A difficult schedule can influence expectations about a team. A contract can influence expectations about a player’s role. Neither tells us the price offered on a specific free-bet market. Joining those facts directly to conversion math would require a declared model, a market target, and out-of-sample evaluation. None appears in this article.
The right move is therefore not to “use what we have.” It is to preserve the sourced facts, classify them as out of scope, and wait for the input the calculation was designed to consume. That keeps the guide from quietly changing its question whenever the feed changes.
The audit trail a future run should leave
When applicable odds arrive, the rebuild should record the promotion terms, the matched market keys, the timestamps, and the books that supplied the quotes. It should also name any row excluded because the market or settlement rules did not match. That record lets a later reader reproduce the comparison instead of trusting a polished percentage.
The final state should be an error-as-value boundary: either a comparable market exists, or it does not. In the second case, the cure string is “supply current matched odds and promotion terms.” This run lands squarely there.
Execution also matters. A quoted hedge that disappears before the free bet is placed is not a usable conversion. The audit should retain the observation time and reject a result when the required sides were not simultaneously available. That keeps a theoretical payoff from being presented as something a reader could have captured.
The final write-up should preserve rejected rows as rejected evidence rather than deleting them from the audit trail. Seeing that a contract fact or schedule fact was considered and excluded explains why the output is empty. It also prevents a later run from reintroducing the same mismatch as though it were new information.
What would reopen the analysis
A future payload can reopen the guide by supplying current, comparable prices for the same market from multiple books, along with the promotion terms that govern the free bet. That is the cure. Once those rows exist, the guide can test the conversion rather than recite the concept.
Until then, the sharp answer is brief: the free-bet method may still be valid, but this run did not check it. The payload had contracts, schedules, and team records. It had no odds.
Bankroll growth from recorded Kelly outcomes
Growth paths are shown only when a verified source supplies recorded bankroll observations for the requested Kelly strategy.
Expected value from graded outcomes
Expected-value cells render only when a verified source binds observed win outcomes to the price paid for the same bets.
