Originally Posted by redietz View Post
I'll repeat this for those who came in late.

There's a reason offshores provide parlay calculators for bettors.

Occasionally, a situation arises (like one offshore allows only parlays for its free bets) where you MUST bet parlays. Occasionally (odds boosts) a situation arises where parlays are marginally the correct thing to do.

But in general, the problems with parlays include: (1) you are usually paying a hidden penalty because you are not getting optimal odds (through time and location) for the wagers being made. So you are losing more juice than optimal or losing half a point from optimal, and those deficiencies can be calculated. They almost always override whatever "advantage" the parlay appears to present. (2) Betting parlays fosters laziness and imprecision. If you wager a parlay at one location as opposed to checking five or six for numbers, you are being lazy. Laziness kills.

If you've ever seen the Coast Casinos cashback/comps rate sheet, you can see how they boost your comps/cashback considerably for parlays, and boost it more as more teams are included in the parlays.

That simple observation should indicate with a banshee scream that parlays are an inferior play to betting straight.

Or as my old partner from Florida used to say (he bet five digits on boxing routinely), "Parlays are for poor people."

Having said all this, I'll repeat one of my favorite digs, namely that the Wizard's site was pushing parlay calculators as a good thing five years ago. All I can say to that is having easier ways to do the math of bad betting is not doing anyone (except the sports books) any favors.
Wasn't that parlay calculator made for the half point parlay cards? You know, where the parley cards had Wednesday's lines that had changed considerably by Sunday?

It's been awhile but I followed those threads about the half point cards. They were only involving the teams where the lines had moved considerably by Sunday. They were laying the favorites at a big discount on the points they were giving up....and getting extra points when taking the dogs.

The toughest problem they had was getting the books to accept their parlay cards.