Glossary / Books & exchanges / Sharp book
A ParlayAPI glossary entry

Sharp book

A sharp book is a sportsbook - Pinnacle, Circa, Bookmaker.eu, BetCRIS - that welcomes high-limit action from winning bettors and continuously reshapes its lines in response to it. Because informed money flows through them freely, sharp books' prices are the market's best public proxy for fair value.

In practice

The sharp-book business model is low margin, high volume, and information harvesting: instead of banning winners, they raise their limits and let sharp action move the number to where it should be. That is why their lines lead the market, why their closes anchor CLV grading, and why their prices - devigged - serve as the fair-value reference for +EV scanning.

Where it shows up in ParlayAPI

Sharp-book prices arrive in the same aggregated responses as everyone else's, so anchor-vs-field comparisons are native to the feed. Per-book data freshness is tracked at /v1/meta/source-quality - anchor freshness matters most, since every fair-value computation inherits it.

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