The filter palette: an overview

One condition, tested against a matchup

Open the palette in the strategy builder and the list looks long. In any one strategy you will use a handful of it. The trick is knowing which handful, and that starts with understanding what a filter is.

Every strategy on Bet2Invest reduces to the same skeleton: a sport, a bet selection, and a tree of filters. A filter is one testable condition about an upcoming matchup, something about its price, its league, one of its teams, or the calendar around it. "The Pinnacle moneyline on the home side is between 1.80 and 2.20." "The away team has won four in a row." Each filter answers yes or no for a given matchup, nothing more. The intelligence of a strategy is not in any single filter; it is in which few you combine.

Combining works through groups. Conditions inside a group are joined by AND (all must hold), OR (at least one must hold) or NOT (which wraps exactly one condition and inverts it). Groups nest, and if you place several root groups on the canvas they combine as an implicit AND. That grammar is enough to express almost any betting idea: "home favorite, AND either well rested OR on a scoring streak, AND NOT playing on grass".

This article is the map. Five companion deep-dives, linked at the end, cover each family in full parameter detail.

The six families

Odds and market

Odds range keeps only matchups where the Pinnacle price for your chosen market and side falls inside a decimal-odds window, anywhere from 1 to 1000. It exists in variants for moneyline, spread, total and team total. Favorite side checks which side the moneyline favorite is on, home or away, so you can target road favorites specifically, for instance.

Market quality

These read the market itself rather than the teams. Vig range filters on the bookmaker margin a team has faced at closing, averaged over its recent matches: a proxy for how tightly the market prices it. Spread cover rate measures how often a team covered the closing spread over its last 10, 20 or 50 games (pushes count as non-covers). League liquidity filters on a league's average closing max-bet limit at Pinnacle. High limits mean sharp, heavily traded markets; low limits mean thinner ones. Note that limits are only archived from around 2026 onward. League result rate looks at how often a league's last 50 settled matches ended in a home win, a draw or an away win, because some leagues are structurally home-heavy or draw-heavy. League line move measures how much a league's moneylines drift between open and close on average; big moves mark softer, less efficient markets.

Team form

Result streak requires a team to be on a consecutive run of a length you set: wins, losses, draws, or their negations. Last N result rate is its smoother cousin. Instead of an unbroken streak, it asks for a result rate over the team's last 3 to 70 matches. Scoring streak does the same as result streak but for goals: consecutive matches where the team scored, conceded, or the match totalled at least (or under) a threshold. Scoring rate turns that into a percentage over a recent window, and Goals average simply filters on average goals scored or conceded per match over the last 10 to 70 games.

Head-to-head

Two filters look only at direct meetings with the upcoming opponent. H2H result rate filters on a team's record over the last 5, 10 or 20 encounters between the pair; H2H result streak requires a consecutive run within those meetings. H2H history is capped at 20 matches. Rivalries change, and 2009 tells you little about tonight.

Scheduling

Rest days requires a minimum number of days (1 to 120) since a team's last match. Match density caps how many matches a team may have played in the last 7, 14 or 30 days, the fatigue angle from the other direction. Day of week restricts matchups to chosen UTC weekdays, and Year pins the UTC calendar year, mostly useful for slicing backtests (historical data reaches back to 2006).

Scoping and sport-specific

League limits the strategy to leagues you pick by hand. Group targets a named collection of leagues (the game title for esports, such as CS2 or Dota 2, or a competition or region grouping), and it is dynamic: new leagues joining the group are included automatically. Team name matches one specific team. Then three filters only make sense in their sport: Surface (tennis: hard, clay or grass), Court environment (tennis: indoor or outdoor) and Best of X (series length, Bo1, Bo3 or Bo5, for esports and other series formats).

Tiers and resource points

Filters are gated by plan tier. The Explorer set is available on any plan: Odds range plus all the scoping and sport-specific filters, Year and Day of week. Pro unlocks the rest of the palette: the form family, head-to-head, scheduling, market quality, and Favorite side. Elite adds exactly one filter, League line move, the only Elite exclusive.

Separately, each filter carries a resource weight reflecting how expensive it is to evaluate. Cheap context checks like Favorite side or Day of week cost 1 point, Result streak costs 2, Last N result rate 3, Goals average 4, and the head-to-head pair 5 each. The weights of every condition in a strategy add up, and that sum counts against your plan's resource-point cap. The full mechanics are in Strategy slots, sports, and resource points.

Conventions worth learning once

A few parameters recur across the palette, and understanding them once saves you rereading every filter's description. Venue scope lets team-history filters count all matches, home matches only, or road matches only; a team's home form and road form are often different animals. Wherever a filter accepts a side, favorite and underdog are resolved from the Pinnacle moneyline, and pick'em matchups, where no favorite exists, are excluded. Rate filters accept a minimum sample size, so "won 100% of recent meetings" cannot mean "won the only one". And history-based filters use fixed last-N windows (typically 3, 5, 10, 20, 50 or 70 matches): short windows react fast but are noisy, long windows are stable but slow.

Choosing from the palette

Do not start from the palette; start from a hypothesis. "Road favorites in low-liquidity leagues are overpriced" is a strategy: three filters, each with a reason to exist. Scrolling the list and stacking conditions until the backtest looks pretty is how you fit noise, a trap Backtesting and overfitting dissects in detail. Fewer conditions and larger samples beat clever-looking trees almost every time.

Where to go next

• Odds and market filters: odds range and favorite side, market by market.
• Form and scoring filters: streaks, rates and goal averages in depth.
• Head-to-head and scheduling filters: direct meetings, rest and congestion.
• League and market-quality filters: vig, liquidity, league rates and line movement.
• Sport-specific filters: surface, court environment, series length and scoping.