Forty years of the same engine
WinPicks did not start out as WinPicks. It started as PC-PICKS, on DOS — and the code that ran it is the direct ancestor of the code running today.
The line of descent
The first season
The earliest date in the codebase belongs to pro football: the copyright string in DEFINE.BAS still reads 1986-2025. Forty seasons ago, on DOS.
PC-PICKS and PC-HOOPS
Before it was WinPicks it was PC-PICKS. The basketball edition carried its own banner — PC-HOOPS, The Pro Basketball Analyst, © 1992 MicroBrothers Software — and that header is still sitting at the top of the file today.
WinPicks 1.0
The move to Windows. The revision history in MAIN.BAS opens with version 1.01 on 5 August 1995 — and the code around it is still full of PC-PICKS. The name changed; the engine did not.
A release every single year
Twenty-seven consecutive seasons without missing one, and 63 documented features along the way: Trend Seeker in 2002, the Formula Warehouse in 2003, the Formula Tuner in 2004, NightShift in 2005.
Still shipping
The Visual Basic line ran to version 30.00 and the copyright to 2025. Customers who bought in the nineties were still getting a new build thirty years later.
WinPicks 2.0
The same engine, rebuilt in C and put in a browser. Forty seasons of data, eight tuner objectives, out-of-sample grading on every screen, and questions you can ask in plain English. Nothing you learned was thrown away.
Nobody ever renamed the internals
When PC-PICKS became WinPicks, the name changed on the box and nowhere else. Three decades later the old name is still in the code, still doing its job:
IN_Constants ' Initialize PC-PICKS constants
IN_Defaults ' Read PC-PICKS defaults file
Global stat$() ' Array of all stats tracked by PC-PICKS
' fav = favored team by PC-PICKS formulaThe team-name file was PC-PICKS.TMS; the file the 2026 engine reads is its direct descendant. Continuity is usually something a company asserts about itself. Here it is visible in a diff.
How the tuner grew up
The Formula Tuner is the clearest illustration of what a long-lived product buys you: nobody designs this in one pass.
The Formula Tuner ships
A Monte Carlo search that varies the numbers and tests as it goes. “A few minutes or overnight.”
NightShift
Run it until a target is met — a number of tries, a number of minutes, or a number of net units. Then go to bed.
More than one objective
Consensus groups could be loaded in, and ATS and Over/Under joined net units as things worth tuning for.
Templates
Tuner settings saved and reloaded, and applied across a whole NightShift session instead of set by hand each time.
Speed
Optimised — most noticeable on the college sports, where the game counts are largest.
All your cores
Multiple copies at once, each tuning a different formula, plus SUR tuning banded by spread size.
It stopped settling
Tuned to 8-0, it now goes looking for 9-0 rather than stopping. Combinational targets arrived in NightShift the same year.
Eight objectives, two engines
It runs on your own machine in the browser, and reports the holdout result beside the training one, so you can see how much of the improvement was real.
Every season, on the record
The features added each year, taken from the release notes of the day.
| Year | What was added |
|---|---|
| 2002 | New Parlay Pack Includes College Basketball Analyst; New Improved User Interface; Trend Seeker; Trend Watch List; Trend Alerts; View Stadiums/Arenas; Improved Web Browser |
| 2003 | Brand New Formula Warehouse; New My Formulas Screen; Improved Trend Seeker; Improved Team History Reports; Analyze All Formulas At Once; Improved Team Reports; Reminders to Download Stats and Analyze Formulas |
| 2004 | Brand New Formula Tuner; Improved Consensus Pick Selections; Improved Consensus Picks Report; Improved MY FORMULAS screen; Built-in link to software updates on HELP menu; Improved Installation |
| 2005 | NightShift Formula Tuner; New RPI Formula |
| 2006 | My Trends lets you store the trends that you want to follow; You can load a consensus group of formulas into the Night Shift Tuner; ATS and OU percentage options have been added to the Formula Tuner; Improved Printing Functions |
| 2007 | The Formula Tuner settings can be saved to a template; Tuner Settings can be loaded into the Night Shift Tuner; ATS Records have been added to the Pool Picks display |
| 2008 | Full team names are displayed on all of the screens; The "Export to Excel" feature now includes the Nevada rotation numbers |
| 2009 | You can now analyze the winning percentage of the Platinum Picks.; The "Turnover" report in Pro Football Analyst has been improved. |
| 2010 | You can now use formula groups with Platinum Picks |
| 2011 | Improved Trends Engine now tracks trends against good and bad teams; Faster performance from Formula Tuner; Improved Line Shifter |
| 2012 | More readable predictions screen |
| 2014 | Four new statistics added to Pro Football Analyst prediction formulas; New Yardage Rankings display added to Pro Football Analyst; Rating Percentage Index (RPI) added to team pages |
| 2016 | Enhanced Formula Tuner; Combinational Settings Allowed in Nightshift Mode of Formula Tuner; New TEST PAST SEASONS features added to Formula Analyzer; MY FORMULAS screen now allows viewing of consensus formula groups |
| 2018 | New Average Point Spread Feature; New Average Totals Feature; Non-Conference Record Added to Team Info Page Standings; Platinum Pages Modified |