How It Works

Every Thursday and Friday night, official NRL team sheets are published on nrl.com. Within minutes of publication, our scraper fetches the full 17 for every match and stores it. Any late changes (jersey swaps in positions 7–10) trigger an automatic re-prediction.

Before generating a prediction, the AI collects:

• Both teams' confirmed 17s
• Recent form (last 5 results) for each team
• Head-to-head record at the venue
• Current ladder positions and points differential
• Weather forecast for match day
• Injury news from NRL media (last 48 hours)

We use Anthropic's Claude to analyse all available context and write out its reasoning before settling on a prediction. The model defaults to claude-haiku-4-5 for regular rounds and upgrades to claude-sonnet-4-6 for finals or when key playmakers (halfback, hooker, five-eighth, lock) are late changes.

The model is given a strict JSON output schema and validates its own prediction before returning it — ensuring team names, confidence levels, and key factors are always well-formed.

HIGH

— clear favourite on form, venue, and team composition. Brier probability: 0.85.

MEDIUM

— meaningful edge identified but notable uncertainty. Brier probability: 0.65.

LOW

— genuinely contested match; result could go either way. Brier probability: 0.55.

Every prediction is stored. Once a match result is confirmed, the prediction is scored automatically — winner correct or not, margin error, and a Brier score that penalises overconfident wrong picks. All results are published on the Accuracy page, including rounds where we performed poorly.