Fade

To fade is to bet the opposite of a given position. Common uses:

- "Fade the public" — bet against the side most casual bettors take. Books often shade lines toward the public to make money off the popular side, creating value on the unpopular side. - "Fade [person]" — bet against a specific tipster/handicapper because their picks tend to lose. - "Fade the line move" — bet against the direction the line has moved recently, on the theory that the move was overdone.

The "fade the public" strategy has a long history but doesn't work as consistently as it used to. Modern books use predictive models that price the public's bias INTO the line already, so the contrarian edge is already squeezed out for major markets.

It still works in smaller markets (low-volume props, college sports, niche futures) where the book doesn't have enough data to perfectly model bias.

SportsBookISH doesn't surface "% of public" because that data isn't reliable and isn't a sharp signal in 2026 — but movement-detection alerts (Kalshi probability moves ≥X%) often correlate with public action getting on a side, which sometimes presents a fade.