All gamblers have done it at least once. We'll start adding random sides from sports we hardly watch, names and teams we might not even know, hoping that just once all the lottery balls align and we hit a ridiculously large parlay.
That parlay never hits. Except it did for one unbelievably fortunate bettor on Thursday.
BetMGM took a 20-leg parlay for $100. It had two tennis matches, eight soccer matches, five NHL games and five NBA games. The bettor needed everything from Ashleigh Barty to an England-San Marino soccer match scoring fewer than 7.5 goals to the Sacramento Kings winning.
And it hit. For a $123,756 win.
What does a winning 20-leg parlay look like?
What's most fascinating about some of these huge parlays you see is trying to figure out how the bettor would even come to the 20 choices on the card.
Is there someone out there who's an expert on the Miami Open women's tennis tournament, World Cup qualifiers, the NHL and the NBA? Maybe.
Here's the card via BetMGM, full of mostly large moneyline favorites.
What might be even weirder than the mix of sports: How did he or she settle on the Portland Trail Blazers and New York Islanders as the two underdogs worth including?
A couple of close calls
The biggest favorite on the card almost ended up blowing the parlay. Top seed Ashleigh Barty faced a match point against huge underdog Kristina Kucova at the Miami Open. Barty rallied from being down 5-2 in the third set to win that set 7-5 and take the match. Imagine if a parlay with 1,237-to-1 odds had 19 legs hit, and the loser was a -1408 tennis favorite.
Everything in the parlay lined up. Marin Cilic won the other tennis match on the parlay in three sets. None of the eight soccer matches blew it. England beat San Marino 5-0, keeping it under 7.5. Sweden barely outlasted Georgia (Go Dawgs?). The Islanders beat the Bruins in overtime. The Trail Blazers came back from an 11-point fourth quarter deficit and won when Damian Lillard sunk three free throws with one second remaining. The Knicks trailed by 17 in the second half and never led until the fourth quarter.
By the time the Kings and 76ers were wrapping up the NBA schedule, one bettor had somehow avoided every single land mine and stuck the landing on a 20-leg parlay. Incredible.
Hitting a 20-team parlay is just about impossible, and playing them is not strategy anyone should follow. But when it hits, it's a story for the ages.
BetMGM took a 20-leg parlay for $100. It had two tennis matches, eight soccer matches, five NHL games and five NBA games. The bettor needed everything from Ashleigh Barty to an England-San Marino soccer match scoring fewer than 7.5 goals to the Sacramento Kings winning. And it hit.
Per ESPN.com's David Purdum, the Riverwalk Casino in Mississippi paid out $104,412.44 to a person on what started as a simple 20-leg bet for $25. The bettor had a string of 20 straight parlay wins in various sporting events throughout the night.
Wyoming college basketball game. LaRose had wrapped up the first 24 legs of his 25-leg parlay at Caesars Sportsbook. The one leg that separated his $25 wager from winnings of $237,553.11 was Wyoming -8 (-110).
According to the Sportsbook, the bettor in question correctly wagered that 16 different players would get at least one hit, which is exactly what transpired as the Rays prevailed 9-5 over the A's. The bet relied on not only on an enormous amount of luck, but also on Friday's game turning into a high-scoring one.
This strategy is one that many consider to be the best parlay strategy. If the favorite wins, the underdog pick helps to balance out the loss of the other game. The other part of hedging is making selections based on when the game is being played.
Building up a parlay that has three to five legs is perfectly fine, but anything more than that is simply too risky. The payout will continue to rise with each new leg that you add, but that doesn't mean that you will see any of that money.
Using the standard -110 vig for point spread and totals bets, these are the odds of winning your parlay based on the number of bets involved: Two-team parlay – 27.47 percent. Three-team parlay – 14.37 percent. Four-team parlay – 7.52 percent.
Hitting bets is hard; hitting two at a time is even tougher, three in a row is tougher than that, and so on and so forth. Since parlays combine so many different things into one bet, the risk is higher than placing any combination of those bets individually.
The odds of winning a parlay involving multiple teams or outcomes are much lower than winning a single bet, making it a less valuable option in terms of expected value, which is a measure of the average outcome.
The best and most profitable strategy to employ with parlays is known as a correlated parlay. Another way to incorporate parlays into your strategy is to bet into weak numbers and combine them with other, stronger spreads to increase your exposure to the weak number.
As such, you should resist the temptation to devote a sizable chunk of your betting bankroll to parlays. Unless you get lucky, parlays lose more often than they win. There's a reason online sportsbooks make so much of their money from parlays.
Assuming a 50-50 chance with each game, the odds are 1 out of 1,048,576. Thus, if this parlay card costs $5.00 to pay, the casino "should" pay you $5,242,880.00 for your efforts, if they had no house edge. Assuming a 50-50 chance with each game, the odds are 1 out of 1,048,576.
Enter 4 in the “Number of Games” box. Enter -110 in each game line box (make sure you enter the minus sign)• Click “Calculate”. It will then tell you that the true parlay odds on this bet would be +1228, meaning you should expect a payout of $1,228.33 on a bet amount of $100.
Using the standard -110 vig for point spread and totals bets, these are the odds of winning your parlay based on the number of bets involved: Two-team parlay – 27.47 percent. Three-team parlay – 14.37 percent. Four-team parlay – 7.52 percent.
In this case, the odds of winning a 12-team parlay are 600-1, according to betfirm.com. The odds of winning each game can be different so the payout can also be different as well. Zerai won $597,354.90 while making a $25 bet on one ticket and $152,693.50 off a $50 bet on another ticket.
With the Cowboys defeating the Chargers, 20-17, the anonymous bettor allegedly won $199,750. A Station Casinos Sportsbook bettor reportedly won nearly $200,000 in a 10-leg NFL parlay.
Introduction: My name is Merrill Bechtelar CPA, I am a clean, agreeable, glorious, magnificent, witty, enchanting, comfortable person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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