Live Smart Alerts are about what's happening on the pitch right now. Pre-match alerts are about what you can know before a ball is kicked. You describe a kind of match once, and Goal Guru checks every upcoming fixture against it, then tells you which ones fit. This guide walks through building one: picking conditions, choosing when to hear about it, and tuning it until it finds the matches you actually want.
Step 1: Start From a Template (or a Blank Alert)
Open My Smart Alerts and create a pre-match alert. The quickest start is a template. There are 12, and each one is an ordinary alert you can edit afterwards. Two examples show how they're put together:
- Goals expected: one condition. Goal Guru's prediction gives over 2.5 goals at least 65%. Daily summary at 09:00.
- Favourite in form: two conditions. The favourite's win odds are at most 1.70, and the favourite has won at least 60% of its last 5 matches.
The first relies entirely on the model. The second checks two independent sources against each other: the market says the favourite is short, and recent results say it's playing like one. Most good pre-match alerts are built the second way.
Step 2: Choose Your Conditions
Every condition comes from one of four sources:
- Goal Guru prediction: the probability our model gives an outcome (match result, both teams to score, goal lines from 0.5 to 3.5, half and team goal lines, first team to score), or its expected goals.
- Team form: a team's last 3, 5, or 10 matches, either all of them or only those at the same venue as this one. Use rates like win rate, clean-sheet rate, or both-teams-scored rate, or averages like goals, corners, shots on target, dangerous attacks, possession, xG, cards, and fouls.
- Head to head: the two teams' previous meetings, either all of them or only those at this ground: win, draw, and loss rates, both teams scored, over-goal rates, average goals.
- Bookmaker odds: match result, double chance, draw no bet, both teams to score, total goals, team total goals, and first-half result.
Each condition can be about the home team, the away team, the favourite, the underdog, either team, or both teams, and uses "at least", "at most", or "between". You can combine up to five, and a match only fits when every one holds.
Mix sources rather than stacking one
Three prediction conditions mostly repeat the same opinion three times. One prediction condition plus one form condition plus one head-to-head condition asks three different questions. The Both teams to score template does exactly this: the model gives BTTS at least 60%, and both teams have seen both sides score in at least 60% of their last 5 matches.
Use "same venue" when venue matters
Home form and away form can be very different. The Home fortress template uses the home side's last 10 home matches, not all of them: at least a 70% win rate at home, plus the model giving the home win at least 50%.
Head-to-head needs history
Head-to-head conditions only work when the two teams have met at least three times. Some fixtures simply don't have enough history, so an alert built only on head to head will be quiet for newly promoted sides and cross-league cup ties.
Step 3: Pick When You Hear About It
Each alert has exactly one schedule:
- Daily summary: pick a time (in 30-minute steps). Every day at that time, you get one summary of the matches in the next 24 hours that fit. Consecutive summaries join up, so a match never appears in two of them.
- Before kickoff: 3 hours, 1 hour, or 30 minutes before each matching game. Each match is checked once, as it comes inside that window.
A daily summary suits planning: one look in the morning and you know which games to watch. Before kickoff suits conditions built on late information. Odds and predictions can still shift in the last hours before a match, and the First-half goal template uses a 1-hour reminder so it checks against the latest numbers. When you save a before-kickoff alert, matches already inside the window are checked straight away, so you don't miss today's games.
Step 4: Check Which Matches Fit Right Now
Before saving, ask Goal Guru which upcoming matches fit the alert at that moment. This is the best tuning tool you have:
- Nothing fits: your conditions are too strict, or you've combined two that rarely happen together. Relax one threshold at a time and check again.
- Too many fit: a summary listing half the weekend isn't helping you choose. Raise a threshold, or add a second source.
- The right handful fit: look at those matches. If they're the kind you meant, save the alert.
Step 5: Read the Results
Matches picked by a pre-match alert show up in three places:
- The alerts inbox, together with your live and match alerts, with a filter by kind.
- The Smart Matches strip on My Matches, for 24 hours, with the alert that picked each match.
- The match's own Smart Alerts tab, which lists every alert that fired for it, with the condition values at the time.
Then watch what happens. If an alert keeps picking matches that don't play out the way you expected, change one condition and see whether the next week's picks look better. And if you want to follow a picked match live, add a match alert to it: your live conditions, checked for that one game.
A Few Alerts Worth Trying
- Goals on both sides: prediction BTTS yes at least 60%, plus both teams' both-teams-scored rate over their last 5 at least 60%.
- Underdog with a chance: the model gives the underdog's win at least 35%, and the underdog has lost at most 40% of its last 5.
- Draw-prone rivalry: at least 40% of previous meetings ended level, and the model gives the draw at least 30%.
- Corner-heavy fixture: either team averages at least 6.5 corners over its last 5.
Who Gets Pre-Match Alerts
Pre-match alerts are part of the Guru plan, with no limit on how many you keep. Until the end of 31 October 2026 (Istanbul time), they're open to everyone as a launch offer. See Pricing for the plans, and What's New for everything else in this release.