They can also cut into the house advantage, Andrews says, by finding out-of-date lines on the parlay cards distributed within casino sportsbooks during the week. Wise bettors might stick to the smaller parlays where they see some definitive edge in the lines in one or two games. The variance with true odds gets wider as you move up (true odds of 7/1 for a three-teamer vs. Traditionally, Nevada sportsbooks pay 2.6/1 for a two-team parlay, 6/1 for three, 10/1 for four, 20/1 for five and on up to 150/1 for eight and 700/1 for 10. “When you play the Powerball or lottery, you know yourself the odds aren’t 2-to-1, it’s some astronomical number, but guys still play it.” “We get a lot of guys who play 10 teams – if you can’t win one game, how can you beat 10? – but the payoff’s going to be awfully attractive,” Andrews, currently on medical leave from running the South Point Hotel Casino sportsbook in Las Vegas, explained in a recent interview. Nice payoffs overcome concern about difficulty A winning, longshot ticket. The figures tracked by the UNLV Center for Gaming Research show that historically, the Nevada sportsbooks win 31% on parlay bets, compared to 5% on all football wagers.Īnd yet, thousands upon thousands of bettors parlay away undeterred, lured by that old gambling maxim of “trying to turn a toothpick into a lumberyard.” As with all sports betting, more people are wagering more money on parlays than they were a decade ago, with $95.1 million put into play on them in Nevada in 2018 compared to $64.6 million in 2008. But parlays are still a bad bet, even if not as bad as for youngsters in Andrews’ old suburban Pittsburgh neighborhood. Considering the average fan tracks pro football more than other sports and figures he knows more about the various teams’ chances, some have waited for the new NFL season for a chance to make a parlay wager. It’s a little bit better than that for modern-day adults across the U.S., gambling on sports legally for the first time. “We never got caught, but if we had, we should have gotten into trouble for larceny, not bookmaking,” Andrews admits in his recently published memoir, “ Then One Day … 40 Years of Bookmaking in Nevada.” Siren call of the longshot parlay payday Odds were skewed against the bettor so that, for example, favorites were -7 but underdogs were +6. Their lines on football games were always even numbers, and ties were losses. Longtime Nevada oddsmaker Chris Andrews made a small killing – at least in terms of a 10-year-old’s finances – running his elementary school’s parlay card racket with two cousins.

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