Parlay bets:

Parlays represent an obvious way for successful sports bettors to up the volume of their action and thus to increase their profit. In a parlay, the bettor is required to bet on 2-10 match-ups (on teams or on totals), and he only wins if each and every one of his individual bets turns out to be a winner. If one of the teams selected in the parlay loses, your whole bet goes right down the drain. If one of your bets happens to be a push, that bet is simply struck from your parlay and the whole thing resets to the next number of bets. When you use the money-line in your parlays, the payout may be altered depending on the line, so you’re better off using a parlay calculator to make sure you get everything right about the bets you make. Why did I say above that parlays are for fairly advanced bettors? It’s quite simple. If you know how successful sports betting works, you probably know the answer too. In order to be successful at betting, you need to take care of two things: you have to secure EV+ and you have to make sure that your bankroll management create the circumstances the EV+ needs to begin working for you. How do you secure Ev+? Through the use of handicapping, reverse handicapping and your line-tracking skills of course.

You have to learn to read the lines and most importantly the reasons behind their movements. You need to be able to spot line movements with relevant meanings and for that you need to have a thorough understanding of how the bookie works. The bookie’s foremost objective is to balance the match-ups he offers, which means he’s always looking to get equal amounts of money coming in on both sides of the games. Why is he so keen to balance his match-ups? Because that way, he can make risk free money, by paying the winners with the losers’ money and keeping the vig for himself (it’s kind of how the poker rake works, only there are no rakeback deals here and the whole setup is much trickier for the bookie). Most of the time, the bookmaker is quite adept and successful at setting his lines in a way that will make both sides of the match-up appear equally attractive for the bettors.

Sometimes however the crowd (mostly the squares) decide to simply ignore the bookie’s efforts and shove their monies into the middle predominantly on one side (usually the favorite’s), thus upsetting the balance. The bookmaker is faced with a choice when this happens. He can elect to cover the square bets from his own pockets, leaving the lines unaltered, or he can move his lines to entice people to counter the square move. The problem with the first choice is that it involves a certain amount of risk for the bookie, and the bookie is not exactly keen on descending into the betting arena to duke it out with its bettors, so the odds have to be really skewed in order for the bookmaker to resort to that solution. Most often, he’ll just alter his lines, and he will thus induce extra value on the other side of the match-up. That extra value can offer savvy bettors a slight EV+.

Now that you understand what it takes to secure EV+, you probably also understand why parlay bets are so difficult to handicap and reverse-handicap. Getting the EV+ right for all your parlay bets is quite a task, and making several EV+ bets and then a couple of EV- ones doesn’t really make any sense at all. In online poker, rakeback deals, will help swing the EV into positive territory, provided you do a whole bunch of other things right. Even if you don’t though and you end up stuck with EV-, rakeback will act to alleviate your losses.