A college football futures price reads as a probability almost directly: a national title contract trading at 12c implies roughly a 12% chance of settling at $1. The catch is that the raw number is inflated by the market's margin, so the honest probability, the de-vigged fair value, sits a notch lower. For Ohio State, the best title price is 12c on Kalshi while the consensus fair value is 10.6%.
How does a futures price become a probability?
Prediction-market contracts settle at $1 if the outcome hits and $0 if it does not. That structure makes the price a probability in disguise: divide the cents by 100 and the market is telling its estimate. A contract at 10c is pricing a 10% chance; a contract at 6c is pricing 6%.
This is the first thing to internalize when moving from sportsbook-style odds to exchange prices. There is no plus-money or minus-money translation to run. The price is the probability, in the same way a coin flip contract would trade near 50c. What remains is to separate the clean signal from the noise the market adds on top.
Why do raw prices overstate the real number?
Add up the best prices across every team in a title market and the total lands well above 100%. That surplus is the overround, the margin that lets venues and liquidity providers stay whole. Because it is spread across the field, every raw price carries a small upward bias.
De-vigging removes that bias. It rescales the field so the probabilities sum to 100%, producing a fair value that is lower than the screen price for essentially every contract. Ohio State's 12c becomes 10.6%. Oregon's 11c becomes 10.1%. Indiana's 9c becomes 9.6%. The gap between the two numbers is the vig at work.
The model also blends more than one venue. When Kalshi and Polymarket disagree, the consensus fair value reflects both, which is why the cheapest place to trade a team is not always the venue that anchors the fair value.
Where does raw price diverge most from fair value?
The useful move is to line up best price against fair value and look for the widest gaps. Notre Dame is the clearest case near the top of the board: 12c on Polymarket against a 9.9% fair value. The quoted price sits above the model's probability, which flags the contract as rich rather than cheap.
Contrast that with Indiana, where the 9c best price on Kalshi actually sits below its 9.6% fair value. Same neighborhood on the board, opposite read. Georgia at 10c on Kalshi against 9.6%, and Texas at 10c on Polymarket against 9%, land in between. The lesson is that headline price alone says nothing until it is measured against the de-vigged number.
Fair value versus best price on the title board
The chart below pairs each contender's de-vigged fair value with its cheapest quoted price. Where the price bar towers over the fair-value bar, the contract is priced richer than the model's probability; where they sit close, the market and the model roughly agree.
Reading the board this way turns a wall of cents into a probability comparison. It is also the quickest way to decide which venue matters: the best price identifies where a team trades cheapest, whether that is Kalshi or Polymarket, while fair value sets the bar it has to clear.
Putting the read to work
The workflow is short: convert the price to a probability, compare it to the de-vigged fair value, and treat any gap as the signal. A price above fair value is the market asking a premium; a price below is the market offering a discount. Neither guarantees an outcome, because both the price and the model can be wrong.
Venue choice sits on top of that read. Across this board the cheapest quotes split between Kalshi and Polymarket, so the same contract can carry different entry costs. New traders comparing venues can weigh promos such as Polymarket's TGSWC or Kalshi's FADE, but the probability math comes first. Read the price as a probability, strip the vig, and let the gap do the talking.
