A market is graded against a source, not against what you watched
Grading is the act of turning a finished event into one of four answers: won, lost, void, or settled on a fraction of the stake. It is mechanical, and it runs against the result source and the market definition named in the rules. This page is about that moment — who is believed, which version of a result counts, and why a market sometimes takes hours to grade when the result looked obvious from the stand.
The result source
The betting rules name who is believed. It is normally a governing body, a league, a race authority or a designated data provider, and the rule is usually written so that the named source is final even when it is obviously wrong to a spectator. That is not a loophole; it is a mechanism for deciding disputes without reference to what individuals remember.
Three practical points follow:
- The broadcast is not the source. A graphic, a caption or a commentator's reading of an event carries no weight. If the source has not recorded it, it has not happened for grading purposes.
- The source is named per sport, and sometimes per market. The same account can use the official league result for one market and a data provider for another, because the markets settle on different things.
- Disagreement between sources is anticipated. The rules generally state which source takes precedence, which is exactly the sentence to look for when two feeds disagree and your bet sits on the difference.
Which part of the event counts
Most grading surprises are not about the final score at all; they are about which segment of the event the market was defined to pay on. The definitions are short and they almost always solve the dispute.
| Market is defined on | What grades it | What it ignores |
|---|---|---|
| Normal time only | The score at the end of regulation | Extra time, penalties, a subsequent amendment by the officials |
| Including extra time | The score after any additional period played | Penalty shoot-outs in competitions that treat them separately |
| To progress or to qualify | Who advances, by whatever mechanism the competition uses | The score at any particular whistle |
| The full event as defined by the rules | The official result published by the named source | Anything that happened outside the event as the rules define it |
| A withdrawal or retirement market | Whether the selection started and completed | The performance up to the moment it stopped |
Two sentences in the rules do most of the remaining work. One states what happens when an event starts but does not finish. The other states what happens when a selection is withdrawn before the event begins — a separate situation from a void market, with its own treatment of the stake. Both are short, both are published, and both are decided before a single result exists.
When a result is amended
Results get corrected. A disqualification is applied hours later, a scoring error is fixed after review, a race is reshaped by a stewards' decision. The betting rules anticipate this, and the clause that governs it usually does two things at once: it names the source whose amended result counts, and it sets a period inside which the market may be re-graded.
That produces the case people find hardest to accept — a bet graded as a win in the evening and re-graded the next day. It is not a malfunction. It is the settlement stage of the chain, and it happens because the settlement happened against a result that was later superseded by the source the rules treat as final.
- Re-graded against the amended result of the named source, inside the period the rules state
- Re-graded when the market definition names a later source than the one originally used
- Held open until the source publishes a result, where the rules say the market settles that way
- Re-graded on appeal to the value of a bet after the correction period has closed
- Re-graded on the basis of a source the rules do not name, however authoritative it looks
- Re-graded on the basis of a broadcast, a graphic or a published table that is not the named source
- Settled both ways at once: a market has one outcome per the rules, whatever several feeds may show
The useful habit is small: read the amendment clause once, and note the period it allows. A correction inside the period is a procedure; a correction outside it is a failure the rules already identify, and that distinction is the whole of the difference between a decision and a complaint.
Four answers, and nothing else
Grading produces one of four answers. Understanding that the fourth exists prevents a great deal of confusion about balances that look wrong but are not.
- Win. The stake is returned plus the profit at the price on the slip, subject to any deduction applied under the rules
- Lose. The stake is gone; nothing is adjusted
- Void. The stake is returned and no profit arises. The price is irrelevant
- Partly settled. A dead heat, or a reduced-place market, settles on a fraction of the stake — neither a win nor a loss, and the arithmetic is separate from both
The partly-settled case is the one most often mistaken for an error, because the balance moves in a way that does not match either expectation. It has its own page here, and it is worth reading before rather than after a market that can dead-heat. For a single bet, that is the whole of grading: an answer, a rule behind it, and a source the rule names.
This page carries an affiliate link to gamdom.com/r/csgo2026. If you open an account through it we may earn a commission. It costs you nothing extra, it does not change what we write, and no operator, bookmaker or result feed pays for a position here. 18+ only. Betting involves risk and can cause serious financial harm — including debt, damaged relationships and mental-health problems. Understanding how a bet is settled does not make it a good bet: a void bet returns the stake and nothing more, a deduction reduces the return that was displayed when you placed it, and a correction can move a balance down. What a market means and when it is graded are set by the operator's betting rules, not by this site. Never bet with money you cannot afford to lose, never borrow to bet, and never stake more to recover a loss. Free, confidential support exists in most countries through national gambling-harm helplines.