Value notes
Two alerts at once: which one you check first
When two drops land in the same minute, you cannot check both. The triage order: freshest first, biggest edge next, and never both at once.
A busy slate produces drops faster than one person can read them. Two alerts land in the same minute and you can act on one. The triage order is simple: the fresher alert first, the bigger computed edge next, and never both at once, because a rushed pair of bets is worse than one careful one.
Freshest first, because the gap is perishable
A drop alert has a shelf life measured in minutes: the gap between the new fair price and what your book still offers closes as other books follow. The dropping odds calculator shows the same arithmetic the feed uses, so the percentage is your first read, checked 2026-10-17. Between two alerts, the one that fired ninety seconds ago beats the one from five minutes back, because the older gap may already be gone.
Check the alerted timestamp against your clock before anything else. If the alert is already old, it is not triage; it is archaeology.
Bigger edge second, computed not felt
Freshness ties break on size, and size is computed, never eyeballed. Put each alert through the same comparison: your book's current price against the alert's fair price, which is the EV calculator's exact job. A 6% drop on a minor-league market and a 3% drop on a main line can produce the same EV or wildly different ones; the percentage alone does not tell you.
The alert with the bigger computed positive edge wins the minute. A tie means either is fine, and checking both is what gets you nothing.
The sports you never triage into
The third rule is a filter, not a sort. Alerts from markets you do not follow lose to any alert from a market you do, regardless of size, because you cannot verify the unfamiliar one in time. Your sport list is set before the slate starts, not during it.
One at a time, always
The final rule is the human one. Two simultaneous careful decisions are two careless ones. Work the queue: freshness check, edge check, act or skip, next alert. If the second alert's gap closed while you worked the first, it was never yours.
Freshest, biggest, familiar, one at a time. The slate will produce more alerts than you can use, and triage is how the good ones get used.