Magic Number works out every club's chances by playing the rest of the season many thousands of times. Each simulated season uses the real remaining fixtures and a rating for every club, and the chance we show is simply how often something happened across all those seasons. A club with a 60% playoff chance made the playoffs in about 60% of them.
Nothing here is a prediction of what will happen. It is a description of how the remaining season could go, given what has already happened.
Every page carries a dot and an "as of" date. A forecast that has quietly stopped updating is a failure even when the page still loads, so the age is always on the page rather than assumed.
Updated within the last few days. The numbers reflect every game played so far.
A little older. Nothing is wrong, but a result may have landed since the last update.
Old enough to distrust. Something in the refresh has probably stopped; treat the numbers as history rather than the current picture.
Fresh is within 3 days of the last update, recent within 10, stale beyond that. A page that is badly out of date also carries a banner saying so.
Probabilities are shown to the nearest whole percent. The estimate comes from a finite number of simulated seasons, so the digits after that are noise rather than information. Printing 47.3% from a twenty-thousand-season sample would be showing precision the method does not have.
You will see >99% and <1% rather than 100% and 0%. That distinction is real: a club that made the playoffs in every simulated season is very likely to make them, but it has not yet clinched. When a place is mathematically settled - it cannot be changed by any remaining result - the page says clinched or out and shows a flat 100% or 0%. Those two words are the only certainty on the site.
Every published forecast is a snapshot that never changes once written, so any number on the site can be traced back to the exact model, rules and data cutoff that produced it.
| Competition | Forecast as of | Model | Rules | Simulations | Snapshot |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NFL | 2026-08-13T16:40:59Z | football_elo football-elo-1.1 | nfl-2012.1 | 20,000 | nfl-2026-20260813T1640Z-95aa |
| MLB | 2026-08-20T02:45:14Z | binary_elo binary-elo-1.2 | mlb-2022.1 | 20,000 | mlb-2026-20260820T0245Z-49ea |
| Premier League | 2026-08-19T02:45:09Z | elo-draws elo-4.0 | premier-league-1995.1 | 20,000 | premier-league-2026-20260819T0245Z-d0ae |
| MLS | 2026-08-20T02:45:14Z | elo-draws elo-2.0 | mls-2014.1 | 20,000 | mls-2026-20260820T0245Z-05c6 |
| USL Championship | 2026-08-20T02:45:14Z | elo-draws elo-2.0 | uslc-2026.1 | 20,000 | uslc-2026-20260820T0245Z-cfbd |
| USL League One | 2026-08-20T02:45:14Z | elo-draws elo-2.0 | usl1-2026.1 | 20,000 | usl1-2026-20260820T0245Z-a717 |
These are the limitations that materially affect a reader's interpretation today. We keep a dated operating record of accepted limitations and update this page when one changes the published forecast.