Question of the Day - 19 January 2018

[Editor's Note: We handed this one off to Blair Rodman, long-time sports bettor and author of our book Kill Phil. Blair is in the middle of writing a book tentatively titled Betting Sports, which will contain comprehensive coverage for beginners, of which the following answer is a good example.]

I think a better way to phrase your question is: How do I get the most bang for my buck in a sports book? For a recreational bettor, sports betting should be viewed as entertainment. Almost every bet you make will have a negative expectation, especially in the NFL, where lines are extremely accurate, especially by game day.

Look at it this way. If you lay $110/$100 on two football games, and you win one and lose one, you'll lose $110 and win $100 for a loss of $10, or $5 per game. Pretty cheap entertainment! Similarly, if you bet four different $100 parlays, each paying 13/5, or $260 for $100, your mathematical expectation is to win one of the four, or to lose $40, so each parlay, in theory, costs you $10. The average price of a Las Vegas show is eight times that amount.

As to your question, there’s not a lot of difference between straight bets, where you lay -110, and money lines with a 20-cent line, such as -130/+110. (Laying -110 is also known as a 20-cent line). As the favorite price on a money line gets higher, the difference between the lay and the take price gets greater in order for the book to maintain about the same advantage. I don’t have space here to get into the math.

Parlays are a longer shot to win, but have a bigger payoff. How do they stack up to straight bets or money lines? Let’s say you bet an even $100 on the first game of a two-teamer. If you win, you receive about $91 (actually $90.90). If you bet the $91 plus your original $100 on the next game and it wins, you end up with a win of about $265, $5 better than if your parlay.

So why would anyone bet a parlay? For one thing, both events might be going at the same time, so you don’t have the luxury of seeing if the first bet wins before wagering on the second. For another, your loss is limited to $100, rather than $220 if you bet both separately and both lose.  And if there's a favorite/over or underdog/under correlation in a parlay, there's some degree of reduction of the house edge, although not enough to give you an advantage, unless the book allows huge favorites and dogs in parlays, in which case you can get an edge. Unfortunately, few books still allow these.

Many bettors use more than two events in a parlay. How do they stack up? It turns out 3-teamers are the sweet spot. Books wanted to have an even payout, so most rounded up to 6/1, which is a slightly better return than if you bet each game separately. If the payout is 6-for-1 (the same as 5/1), don’t touch it. As the number of teams in a parlay increases, so does the house edge.

As for teasers, Stanford Wong in his excellent book Sharp Sports Betting laid out a strategy for getting an edge in NFL teasers. This involved teasing through the key football numbers 7 and 3. For example, if you tease two 7.5-point favorites down to 1.5 on a 6-point teaser, you have a small edge. This is assuming you lay only -110 to make the teaser. Many books raised their teaser prices in response to Wong’s revelations, so be sure to ask before making a teaser bet and stay away from teasers that charge 120/100 or higher. I’ve seen as high as -135! Also, some online books consider a tie a loss on 2-teamers, while most Las Vegas books have a rule that any tie in a teaser is a push on the whole bet, regardless of a win or loss on the other leg. Be sure to know the rule before you bet.

The bottom line is that money lines, pointspread bets, parlays, and teasers are pretty close in the cost to you for entertainment. I was part of a group in the '90s that did very well betting sports, so I know only too well how difficult it is to gain an edge on the sports books. I also know that most people who bet sports don’t have the talent, time, organization, and dedication to devote to doing what it takes to win.

If you are, that's good. But people who do surface-level handicapping and think they have an edge over the books are known as "half-sharp bettors." Casinos make a good living from half-sharp bettors who think they can beat the sports book. Don’t be one. Just have some cheap fun!