Fair value is the whole argument
A ticket starts with a modeled probability — the desk's estimate that the contract settles YES. If the model says a side wins 58% of the time, fair value is 58 cents. Everything else on the ticket is bookkeeping around that single number.
The market price is what you actually pay. Edge is the gap between the two, in cents. The desk does not post a ticket under an eight-cent gap, because below that the estimate is not sharper than the noise in the input data.
Entry is a limit, not a suggestion
The entry price on a ticket is the worst price the thesis survives. Paying two cents above entry cuts the edge by a quarter on a typical position. If the book has already moved past entry when you look at it, the correct action is to skip the ticket, not to chase it.
Use resting limit orders at entry rather than market orders. On thin NFL books the spread is frequently three to five cents wide, and crossing it every time is a guaranteed drag that no model overcomes.
Stops and targets are pre-commitments
Stops sit roughly ten cents below entry, targets roughly twelve above. That is deliberately close to symmetric: the desk is not trying to win big on any one ticket, it is trying to be right slightly more often than the price implies and to repeat that a few hundred times.
A stop is not a prediction that the thesis died. It is a rule that caps how much a single wrong read costs. When a stop fills, the ticket is closed and the position is not re-entered on the same game unless the invalidation note explicitly allows it.
Sizing and risk
Risk on each ticket is two percent of desk bankroll, sized off the distance to the stop — not off the contract price. A ticket with a wide stop gets fewer contracts, a tight one gets more, and both cost the same if they lose.
That is why contract counts differ wildly between tickets that look similar. The number to compare across positions is the risk line, not the number of contracts.