If you win the first leg, now you have $19.09 (your $10 initial stake plus $9.09 in winnings). Each leg is -110, and the total play pays +600. The example they use is a three-leg $10 parlay. In The Logic of Sports Betting, Ed Miller and Matthew Davidow advance the idea that a parlay should be treated like a series of successive bets of increasing stake. There are two ways to look at how a parlay works. From there, multiply them all together, and convert back to odds.Ģ7.64 percent = +264 (The difference is in the rounding.) You could convert each leg to decimal odds, multiply those values together, then convert back to American odds.Īnother way to calculate the payout is to convert the American odds to their implied probabilities. There are a couple of ways to calculate the payouts, to help see what’s going on under the hood. The math behind them is relatively straightforward. We assume you already know what a parlay is.

There are times to deploy parlays, and a time to keep your powder dry. They can certainly be tempting for some bettors. Still, that doesn’t necessarily make parlays a bad play. And, eventually, following you around, telling you about how they just missed on the last leg of their parlay. But there’s a decent chance that thought led you to parlays.īecause we’re talking about sports betting in the year of our lord 2023, we know you’ve listened to plenty of people planning their parlay.

” Maybe that led you to the stock market or Bitcoin or Powerball or fancy digital basketball cards or running Fyre Festival. At some point in your life, you may have considered the possibility and concluded with great certainty: “I’d like to invest a tiny bit of money and get back, in return, Scrooge McDuck money.

Parlay sports betting