Baseball Bets

Many sports bettors don’t know how to figure two- and three-team winning parlays, and take it for granted that the bookie’s payoff price is correct. Many bookies, knowing this, payoff less than they should.

Hundreds of sports betting bookies compute their odds payoff on the basis of a $1 price line and, knowingly or unknowingly, cheat their customers of thousands of dollars yearly merely by dropping a penny fraction or the third decimal place when it appears.

For example, suppose you made a $50 bet by parlaying two ball teams and played odds of 6 to 5 on each game. You win, and your bookie converts the 6 to 5 odds into a money price of $1 to 831f.J¢, which is correct. The fraction is awkward, so he drops it and pays you $167.44. This fraction-dropping has cost you 61¢ because the correct payoff price figures out as $168.05. Doesn’t be a chump for a bookie; learn to do your own figuring.

It is not difficult to figure parlays of single-game payoffs if you use the following method especially devised by the author for the readers of this book.

Computing the payoff odds on a single game sounds simple enough -but is it? Suppose you made a $5 bet at 6 to 5 odds, and you won. How much money must your bookie pay you? If you had made a $6 bet, you would not need to do any pencil work; at 6 to 5 odds you’d expect to receive $11. However, the fact that you bet $5 makes it harder to figure; at least it is for most inexperienced sports bettors.

Here’s how to do it. First put down the amount of your sports betting, in this case $5; then put a multiplication sign after it.

Now add the odds figures (in this case, 6 plus 5) and use the answer (11) as the bottom part (denominator) of a fraction. One of the odds figures is used as the top part (numerator) of the fraction. Which one? That depends on whether you were laying or taking the odds. When you lay the odds, the complete fraction will be more than 1/2, when you take the odds it will be less than 1/2. If you lay odds of 6 to 5, the fraction will be 6/11; if you take to 6 to 5 odds, the fraction will be 5/11.