Results for Sat 22 August 2026

Eleven picks. Five won, one half-won, five lost, and the day finished 1.54 units down at minus fourteen per cent. It is the worst day of the week and the losses share a shape worth setting out plainly.

Four of the eleven were on the minus one goal line, and three of them died the same way. Nomme Kalju lost 1-0. Slavia Prague drew 2-2. Union Omaha drew 1-1. Not one of those was a thrashing. Two were draws and the third was a single goal.

A minus one handicap has no push protection. If your team wins by exactly one the stake comes back, but a draw is a full loss and it settles no differently from losing four nil. That is the trade you make for the price, and on Saturday the trade went against us three times out of four. Al-Ahli won 4-0 and was the only one of the four that was never in doubt.

The quarter lines did the opposite, as they are designed to. Pogon drew 2-2 away from home on a plus quarter, so the level leg pushed and the half-goal leg won. Half the stake back plus half a winner, instead of nothing. Tristan Suarez won 2-0 outright. That is the whole argument for a split line in one afternoon: the same draw that destroyed three bets on minus one turned into a partial winner on plus a quarter.

Victoriano Arenas at 2.19 was the standout. A Draw No Bet in the Argentine lower divisions, won 1-0, and the biggest single return on the card. Montedio Yamagata at 1.90 on a plus half was second. Both are high odds lane selections and both came from markets where the exchange was the only sensible venue.

One selection was withdrawn before publication. Juarez Women had a single price from a single book and nothing anywhere to check it against. I do not tip a bet I cannot verify, and that has not changed.

I will also record something I got wrong during the day rather than quietly move past it. I initially reported that Al-Ahli had no Betfair market. It did. The absence was in my own data pull, not in the market, and I only found the real price because the reader who spotted it pushed back. A missing price in our feed is a statement about the feed. It is never a statement about the world.