How we check the data

Where the numbers come from

TAB runs Soccer 6, Soccer 10, Soccer 13 and Soccer 13 Extra. Its official site is soccer6.co.za. When you open that site, your browser asks TAB's own servers for the pool lists and the results. This site asks the same public addresses, the same way your browser does. TAB's robots.txt allows it: it reads "User-agent: *" then "Disallow:" with nothing after it, which opens the whole site.

We store facts only: match numbers, team names, competition names, kick-off times, pool open and close times, pool status, pool totals, match results, winning combinations and published payouts. We copy no operator writing, no operator tips and no operator pictures.

Why a page does not change while you read it

This site fetches nothing while you are on it. A script collects the data on a schedule and saves it to disk. The pages are then built from those saved files. So a page is never older than the check time printed on it, and if the operator goes down, nothing here changes on its own. We also keep every collection as a dated copy, and we never edit or delete one. That means we can still show you what the operator published last week.

The pages grow. They do not reset. The operator's results feed only carries the last few pools, so a page built from that feed alone would lose the older ones. Instead we keep every finished pool we have already seen and add the new ones to it. That is 537 finished pools on file today.

The one thing we worked out ourselves

An operator prints the winning combination as a row of symbols. It prints the match scores somewhere else. Nowhere does it tell you what each symbol means. So we did not guess. We lined up every symbol against the published score of the match in that slot, across every finished pool on file.

That is 5,248 comparisons across 537 finished pools, and 4,926 of them agreed with the mapping that operator publishes. 322 did not. All of them are in Soccer 13 Extra. We leave that on the page it affects instead of correcting it quietly, because it is a gap in the operator's own data rather than a different meaning. The check is a script in this site's repository, so we can run it again on tomorrow's data.

This matters more than it sounds, because the two operators do not use the same symbols. On the TAB pools, 1 is a home win and 3 is an away win. On the National Lottery pool, 4 is a home win and 1 is an away win. The same symbol means the opposite thing, depending on whose card you hold. A site that learned one key and used it for both would print half its winning combinations backwards. We measured every mapping below from that operator's own published scores, and the mapping travels with the data instead of being typed into a page.

How we label what we tell you

Checked here

We worked it out from the operator's own published data, and anyone can repeat the working. The symbol mapping above is the main example.

The operator states

Taken from the operator's own page. They say it, and nobody outside has checked it. Pool split percentages, ticket prices and record payouts all sit in this group.

Not published anywhere

Something you would fairly want to know that no public source gives. We write these down as gaps. We do not fill them with something that sounds right. The percentage behind each of the four Soccer 13 payout levels is one gap. There is also no public SportStake feed.

What is not built yet

MatchPlay 8 is not covered. The National Lottery prints sixteen winning numbers for an eight match card. That reads as a half time pick and a full time pick on each match, rather than one pick per match. Publishing a card on that guess would be wrong, so we publish nothing about it until we check it. We collect MatchPlay 14, MatchPlay 9/14 and MatchPlay 14 Omnisports every day and the history is building up, but they have no pages yet.

We are arranging a way to enter these pools online through a licensed operator. That account does not exist yet and we have not read its terms, so this site does not link to it and claims nothing about it.

Money

SoccerBetting SA is not a bookmaker. We take no bets and we hold no money. Some of our links to licensed operators are commercial links, and this site can earn a commission from them. That money never changes a fixture list, a result or a payout on this site, because we republish those from the operator’s own feed.