Originally Posted by
stevenash
Suppose there are two teams that you like this week. One of them is -$1.30 and the other is -$1.40. You have to bet a total of $2.70 to win $2.00. If one of them loses, say the $1.30, you win $.71, which in anybody's bookkeeping system, is a loss. Turn it around and say you lose the -$1.40 play. Your winner brings you $.77. Either way, you have lost money. If you lost both games, you're out the full $2.70.
Instead, let's say you parlay those same two favorites for $1.00, and they both win, you win $1.95, which is just a nickel short of what you'd win in the first example except you've put up way less money. If one of your teams loses, which is going to happen 6 times out of ten, you lose only $1.00 on each parlay bet.
In a recent year, 41 games closed at -$2.00 on the money line. Of these games, the favorite won 25 times, or 61 percent. Had you bet on these favorites, you would have lost money.
Let's see what happens when we apply our new knowledge of parlay wagering to the sample of 25 favorites winning (out of 41 plays) at -$2.00. If you bet these games $2.00 to win $1.00, you would have cashed 25 tickets at $1.00 per ticket, but you would have lost 16 times at $2.00 per ticket. That works out to $25 won, less $82 bet, equals -$57 net loss.
If you had parlayed those bets, the results would most likely be different. We say "most likely" because we have to assume some percentages. The first, and most noticeable, effect is that you only need to bet $41 instead of $82. Assuming that the percentages play out, you should win 16 of these 41 wagers. If we refer to our Parlay Payoff Chart below, we see that we should average $1.25 per win.
The bad news is that the $20 returned still results in a net loss. The good new is that you only had to wager half as much money to lose less than you would have with flat betting. With the parlay bet, you would have bet $41 and returned $20, for a net loss of $21.