Parlays are for Suckers!! Or are they?

OPENING LINE

Good evening sharps! I hope you had a great weekend betting and overall.

In this week’s edition, we’ll walk you through the math behind parlays, how you can use them to enhance your ROI, and how to optimize them. We’ll also give you an overview of what’s going on in the sports betting world, give you some tips that will help you for the week, and cover some of the news in the industry.

Please do give your feedback at the bottom and we’ll make any necessary changes.

Best of luck this week!

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Before you dive in:

We’ve also shared this article as a thread on Twitter. To help spread it around, we’re giving away a month-long subscription of the Betting Market Digest to 2 random people who retweet the first tweet by Friday. If you’re one of those folks, we’ll get you started this weekend. 🤝 

THE STRAIGHT BET
Parlays are for Suckers!! Or are they?

We’ve all heard the adage that parlays are for suckers. It’s a sucker bet. I’ve told you that as well in the past as well (we all evolve!). The books make a killing off of it, and that’s why they promote it. Read any of their social medias or any of the betting industry social medias and that’s all they’re doing. At the top of their apps they have common parlays, etc.

And, all of the above is true! On straight bets, the books usually hold about 5%, and on parlays it’s around 15-20%. They make a killing off of parlay bets.

However, parlays are only sucker bets for those who suck! Parlaying doesn’t magically turn bad bets into good ones. It also doesn’t turn good ones into bad ones. It not only enhances losing, but winning as well.

Let’s go through the math and how you can use parlays to actually enhance your winnings.

➕ The Math behind Parlays

To make it easy, let’s assume that you’re creating a 3-leg parlay with each leg being -110. That means you have a 50/50 chance of winning each leg. Which means you have a 0.5×0.5×0.5=0.125 (or 12.5%) chance of winning the parlay. A 3-leg parlay pays just under 6-1 (+597), which has an implied probability of 14.35%. If a public or recreational bettor plays 96 3-leg parlays at $100 each, they’d win 8 and profit $597 each (or $4,776), but will lose 88 and lose $8,800 on those, for a net loss of $4,024. If instead of those playing all those parlays, if he/she played 96×3=288 straight bets, he’d win 144 (for a profit of $14,400), but will lose also 144, for losses of $15,840, and a net loss of $1,440.

Since a loss of $1,440 is better than a loss of $4,024, it’s better for a public/recreational bettor to straight bet. Those extra $2,584 is good for the books, which is why they promote them!

But, what about a winning bettor? One that hits at 55% (aka, a sharp)?

They’ll have a 0.55×0.55×0.55=0.1664 (or 16.64%) chance of winning the parlay, which is above the implied probability of 14.35%. If our sharp plays 96 3-leg parlays at $100 each, they’d win ~16 and profit $597 each (or $9,556), but will lose 80 and lose $8,000 on those, for a net gain of $1,556. If instead of those playing all those parlays, if he/she played those 288 straight bets, he’d win ~158 (for a profit of $15,800), but will lose ~130 for losses of $14,300, for a net gain of $1,500.

So, our sharp profited $1,556 from parlaying, but $1,500 from straight bets. The parlaying profit goes up the better he/she is. So, parlaying enhances profits for good bettors! It is profitable as long as you consistently win at a rate of 52.4% or more.

🦵 Optimal Number of Legs

Unless your book reduces payouts for having a higher number or legs, any number of legs will be profitable for a sharp bettor. Here’s a table that illustrates that.

So, we can see that our bettor is profitable at any number of legs. However, I don’t recommend anything more than 6. Lets say you have 100 Units in your bankroll, and bet 1U on each parlay, you have a 21% chance of going bust betting 7-leggers, 42% betting 8-leggers, and 78% betting 10-leggers. You will be profitable in the long-run, but it might be longer than your bankroll allows. Also, emotionally, can you handle losing 20, 30, 50, or 100 parlays in a row?

I personally like to keep it to 2-3. Why? It’s hard to find 6 strong plays in a day, and hard to manage. Let’s dig into that.

🦵 How to choose your legs?

Obviously, your legs need to be performing above 52.4%. One way is to is test your systems and methods over hundreds of plays to have a statistically significant sample to make sure it performs above 52.4%.

For us, the sharp concentrations historically perform at 55% for LOWS, 56-58% for MEDIUMS, and 59-60% for HIGHs. So, you could just parlay those.

However, we can then filter for the currently high performing sharp concentrations (in the Betting Market Digest). So, we might not include LOW sharps if they’re struggling (or we can fade them). We can then take it a step further and isolate the high trending (either good or bad) parts of the cycle, where they perform at 60%+.

But, with all of this filtering, we only arrive at a few plays a day if any. We typically don’t want to parlay everyday, but only when we’re hot, to further enhance the profits at those times.

Also, with just a few legs, we can optimize our parlays better.

📈 Parlay Optimization 

First, I would STAY AWAY from same-game parlays. The books short change you big time there. It makes zero mathematical sense to do SGPs. Their hold is around 30-40% on those.

Second, I would try to have some diversification, across multiple games or even sports.

Third, and the most important. I would optimize it to be able to exit. This means to try the best I can to have the legs in chronological order without any overlap. Of course, that’s impossible sometimes with simultaneous games. Therefore, I try to have the last leg for sure be in a game after the first legs end. This might mean that the first legs are 1H or F5 legs instead of full game.

If possible, I’d try to have an open parlay or a rollover. Open parlays are where you don’t pick all the legs at once. You might pick a 5-legger, and fill out 2 legs today, 2 in three days, and the last one in a week. Every since 5Dimes went out of business these have become rare, and so then I might just do a rollover. A rollover is where you just push forward your winnings, similar to a ladder bet.

🚪Exiting a parlay

We’ll cover exits and cashing out a parlay at depth in the next edition, but let’s touch on that now.

One reason why bettors aren’t profitable on parlays is because they don’t know when (or don’t want to) exit the parlay, aka, cashing out or hedging. They either get stubborn and then feel like that got screwed on the last leg. When actually, they could’ve secured a nice profit by cashing out or hedging. You can also reduce your losses that way as well. Having your last leg be on an island allows you to put forth all of your effort into figuring out an exit if things go south or get too volatile.

Again, we’ll cover that next week, but, have an exit plan.

Wrap Up

Parlays compound losses for unsuccessful bettors, but winnings for successful ones. They are NOT a sucker bet. They can be profitable at any number of legs, but realistically, keep them to 6 or less, preferably 2-3.

Make sure your legs are performing at a profitable level, and, stay away from SGPs. Optimize your parlays so you can manage them, all the way to the exit, which we’ll cover more in-depth next week.

There’s one last benefit to parlays. They help prevent you from being limited by the books! They still view them as “sucker” bets, and you as a recreational bettor, instead of as a sharp. So, if you are a winning bettor, you can win even more.

If you have any questions, be sure to reply to this email! Best of luck!

ON THE BOARD
This Week in Sports Betting

⚾️ All week: Regular season is in full swing. The MLB regular season is continuing. We wrap up the week with a Red Sox-Yankees series. The books should end up rooting for the Red Sox.
⚽️ Thursday: Euro 2024 knockout rounds continue. The ongoing Euros continue their knockout rounds with the Round of 16 and Quarterfinals. It’s seemingly a 6-team race with only six teams below +1400. After escaping Slovakia in the Round of 16, England are now the favorites at +375, followed by Spain at +400, Germany at +450, France at +450, the Netherlands at +650 and Portugal at +850. Of those six, sharps have been on Germany, the Netherlands and Portugal. Books are rooting against England. Four of those teams (Spain-Germany and France-Portugal) will be playing eachother in the quarterfinals in the top half of the bracket.
⚽️ Thursday: Copa America knockout rounds begin. Copa America gets their quarterfinals started with a match between Argentina and Ecuador. After liability Mexico was eliminated in the group stage, Argentina has a seemingly easy path to the Final. They won’t have to play anyone within the World Top 30 on their path. They’re +125 to win the title now. Sharp side Brazil is second at +300, followed by the other sharp side Uruguay at +500. The US (another liability) crashed out in the group stage.
🎾 All week: Wimbledon. Wimbledon is in full swing with the opening rounds. The books will be rooting for the big names (Sinner, Djokovic, Alcaraz, Swiatek, Gauff, Sabalenka, etc.) to stick around to attract handle. The sharps are on #3 Sabalenka, and #1 Swiatek, #3 Sabalenka, and #5 Pegula on the Women’s side and #12 Tommy Paul and #15 Holger Rune on the Men’s side.

TAKING THE POINTS
3 Quick Tips to help you find your Edge

• The bottom half of the Euros bracket is pretty weak. Consider a longshot bet on Turkey or Switzerland to win the tournament or make the Final.

• July and August are “moving months” in the MLB, especially as we approach the trade deadline. Consider placing Future bets on 2nd or 3rd place teams that are coming on strong. For example, the Astros have made up 6 games on the Mariners in the last 1.5 weeks.

• Always shop around between different sportsbooks.

KEY NUMBERS
News from around the betting world

🇺🇸 63%. Donald Trump’s odds have upped to 66% on Polymarket, the highest he’s been trending this year, after last Thursday’s debate with Joe Biden. However, the story is on the Democrat side with the uncertainty on whether Biden will drop out. He has dropped from 35% to 15%, while other Democratic contenders, especially Kamala Harris, have all risen dramatically. Biden (60%) is still the favorite to win the nomination, but that is down from 90% last week. Elsewhere around the world, Keir Starmer (99%) is holding steady to oust Rishi Sunak as the British PM in their election on Thursday.
🏏 +2000. India won the T20 Cricket World Cup on Saturday. At one point late in the match vs. South Africa, they were +2000. However, they ended up winning after perennial chokers South Africa did it again.
🎰 $200M. Prophet Exchange, which had shut down earlier this year, is coming back after a rebrand to ProphetX. They were the first betting exchanged opened in New Jersey and had over $200M traded on the platform.
🎰 12%. LetsBetMD went live in Maryland. I DO NOT recommend using the platform because of the very bad odds. For example, on yesterday’s Mets-Nationals game, they priced it at Mets -149 and Nationals -117, a 12% hold. For comparison, Fanduel priced it at Mets -116 and Nationals -102, a more reasonable 4% hold.

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