Originally Posted by mickeycrimm View Post
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.
I wrote about this 30 years ago. And 10 years ago. And all points in between. So not exactly a revelation.

The half-point frozen-in-time lines started with the Stardust and Boyd.

As I mentioned a number of times, the old Stardust bookmaker did not like me and would go to windows to ensure I didn't bet more than $50 on a parlay card. I was using the frozen lines staggered in time, but not in some mega-serious way. There were cartels hitting all of the Boyd properties simultaneously so as to go after the cards to the best of their ability. I was not them. I was killing time because I was at the book two to three hours before kickoff at the Stardust and why not kill time by going after the frozen lines?

To be clear, this was no big secret "AP angle." Any sports bettor with half a brain was doing it. I get a kick out of the people who "share the secret" on friggin' Youtube decades after the heyday when everyone was doing it. There were probably a dozen or more people any given Saturday in the Stardust doing this stu

One of your weaknesses in your mentions of the Walters book is the fact that when you talk about various Walters numbers, the discussions of the NFL are based on particular (dated) data bases. The editor (I blame him) allows the author to skate by without addressing the elephant in the statistical room. All editing decisions are pretty much purposeful, so this wasn't an accident of fate.

The main conceit, I guess is the word, is the idea that -- given rules changes year-to-year and the huge differences from the college game to the NFL game -- that there was some kind of innate precision to a "parlay calculator" if you were trying to apply it to frozen lines. Better just to use heuristics and eyeball the games. If you're actually trying to apply a set formula to values of half-point-and-more variances, a static formula has immense drawbacks. You'd be chasing your tail to try to make adjustments on the fly year-to-year without any kind of data base that would be sufficient to draw any working conclusions. And that would also be a conceit -- that what you just saw for two or four or six weeks is deserved of adjustments.

There's a kind of false precision when you think that a "parlay calculator" would work better than your eyeballs and your brain. The calculator is basically a short cut holding your hand, giving you a false sense of security and control, as if you were flipping the same coins year to year.

Interestingly, this came up tangentially during my last lunch with Mr. Munchkin. We didn't discuss this directly, but I did mention a sportsbook that had a precise sliding scale for buying various half points in football. The weakness was that, because the NFL is the dominant betting league, the scale was set to reflect NFL recent historicity only. I don't blame them - why do extra work and all that, but it left some subtle weaknesses.