Successful Parlays Bring Pleasure

Have you ever played a game of craps or blackjack and let a bet "ride"? In other words, you bet, you win, and you leave that bet out there and play again. You hope to win that bet again. What you are essentially doing is executing a "parlay," a combination or "accumulator" bet in which you, as the player, are hoping that all of the bets you are placing are going to wind up winning. They actually HAVE to.

Generally, if you were betting a number of football, soccer or hockey games, the components of the parlay would all be occurring at the same time. So at the end of the day, you would look up and see whether you hit your parlay.

But it is the same principle as it works in, say, a table game. But you will not be paid off at the same rate as you might in a football parlay. In point of fact, you would get paid at a higher rate.

Let's illustrate this. Commonly, a parlay on a two-team parlay in the NFL or CFL is paid off at odds of 2.6-to-1. So if you bet $1000, you would be paid a profit of $260.

But when you are in the casino, think about what happens. You put a single unit bet out there and win. Now you do it again, and win again. What do you have at the end of that sequence? You have four units, which means a three-unit profit. So you have been paid off at odds of 3-to-1. In other words, you would be getting paid off at the "true" odds.

This holds firm all the way down the line, as you would see if you looked at a typical table to parlay payout odds in a sportsbook. You would see that if you were to win a set of six events in a parlay, you would be paid at odds at 48-to-1. If you kept doing the same thing in a casino at blackjack, without all the bets paying off at even money (we're assuming no 'blackjack' payouts of 3-to-2 in this scenario), you would have 64 units at the end of a sequence that began with one chip. So in other words, you would have been paid off at 63-to-1 odds.

Naturally,. you must have tremendous luck in order to be able to pull this whole thing off. But this may explain the fascination on the part of some people in parlaying a bet when they win. They are actually not getting bad value when all is said and done.