Parlays, Accumulators, and Multiples Explained

Want the chance to win big money with a small bet? You’ve come to the right
place. Parlays, also sometimes referred to as accumulators or multiples, are a
sports bet type that is designed to give you the chance to win big payouts from
a proportionally much smaller investment. For the sake of this article, we will
be referring to this bet type as a parlay, but keep in mind that the other two
names are completely interchangeable as they mean the exact same bet type.

What is a Parlay?

A parlay is a type of sports bet that allows you the opportunity to make
significantly more money on a smaller investment. These bets are tougher to win
and carry more risk than a traditional sports bet, but make up for the risk with
the appealing payouts. In the simplest terms, a parlay is when you take multiple
individual bets (two or more) and string them together to make one big bet.
These individual bets are comprised of point spreads, over/under (totals), or
moneylines. To win the parlay, you must win all of your individual bets that
make up the parlay.

For example, let’s say that there are three games on tonight that you are
interested in betting on. Let’s also say that you want to bet $150 total for the
night. You think that Team A, Team C, and Team E are all going to win.

• Team A vs. Team B
• Team C vs. Team D
• Team E vs. Team F

As Individual Bets

You could bet on each of these games individually, or you could bet on all
three of them at once as a parlay. Let’s take a look at the differences and
payouts associated. We’re assigning some pretty basic payout odds to each team.

• Team A -110
• Team B +105
• Team C -110
• Team D +105
• Team E -110
• Team F +105

You could bet on each team individually, and your payouts would look like
this if you won each game.

As a Parlay

Let’s look at what would happen if you were to bet on these three games as a
parlay. The odds and everything on each game are exactly the same.

The Takeaway

At first glance, you might think that you should always bet parlays instead
of individual bets as the payouts are so much sweeter! There are a few things
that you want to consider though before looking to adopt this strategy.
Technically, related to the odds, the payouts are the same. (We can see your heads spinning in confusion
now). What we mean is that the payouts are correct for the odds of the event
happening. It becomes significantly tougher to win three games in a row, which
is the reason for the higher payouts. The payouts aren’t artificially inflated
or anything but pay out at the true odds. We are going to convert the odds into
decimal odds to make this a bit easier to understand.

• Team A is -110 to win which is the same as 1.91 in decimal odds.
• Team C is -110 to win which is the same as 1.91 in decimal odds.
• Team E is -110 to win which is the same as 1.91 in decimal odds.

The way you calculate the odds of multiple events ALL occurring is by
multiplying the probabilities together. So the odds of all three events
occurring is:

The odds of A winning (times) the odds of C winning (times) the odds of E
winning

If we bet $150 at odds of 6.967, we get paid out $1045.05 minus our original
bet of $150, which gives us a profit of about $895.05 (slightly different
because of rounding). If you’ll notice, that is the same number from our parlay
example above. Technically, the sportsbook is throwing no additional money into
these bets. They are just letting you tie multiple bets together to get a
bigger, but less likely to win payout. So as we said, parlays payout based on
the same odds as a straight bet, but get their bigger numbers by combining the
bets into one and forcing you to win all of them.

This leads us to our other important takeaway. A parlay bet requires that you
win ALL of the bets to win your bet. In the above example, let’s say that Team C
actually loses the game. As individual bets, you will still profit $90.90 as you
will win 2/3 of your bets. In the parlay example, you will lose $150 overall
because your bet requires all three of the teams to win to count. As you can
see, parlays offer high payout totals (not better odds) but are much more
challenging to hit.

Examples of Parlays

We’re going to walk you through an actual parlay bet for a two-team option
and what happens when we decide to add a third-team to that option. Before we go
any further, though, we want to point out a bit of terminology that is
important. Your parlay can have as many bets as you’d like it as long as the
sportsbook does not have a limit on this. If you have two bets on a slip, it is
called a two-teamer. If you have three bets on a slip, it is called a
three-teamer. This continues and is the correct terminology even if you have
individual people you are betting on.

Here is our sample betting slip where we are betting on England to beat
Norway AND Ireland to beat Oman. Our budget on this bet today is €20.

Let’s point out a few things. First, this would be called a two-teamer as we
are putting two different bets into our parlay. The odds for each individual bet
are posted at 1.40 for each game. Both teams are favorites going into this game,
so our payouts will be lower than some of our earlier examples. These would be
the same as -250 in moneyline style odds. One of the greatest things about using
an online sportsbook is that they automatically will calculate the odds and
potential payout for you. We put in our bet size, and it tells us that we can
win €39.20 for our €20 wager. This would be a profit of €19.20 as if you
remember, decimal odds will always include the original stake.

If you do ever get confused by the different types of odds, you can use our
converter to change them into whatever different style of odds you prefer.

Let’s see what happens when we decide to add another bet to our parlay and
turn it into a three-teamer.

As you can see, we would stand to get a payout of €76.44, or a profit of
€56.44 on our wager. The amount you can win will always go up when you add more
teams to your parlay. The amount they go up will depend on how big of a favorite
or underdog the teams are.

Benefits and Drawbacks of Parlays

Parlays really have one big benefit and one big drawback that are
interconnected. The big upside to a parlay bet is that you can win a pretty big
payout from a proportionally smaller wager. The big downside, though, is that
the bets are a lot riskier and harder to win as you have to win every single
game on the ticket. If you bet $100 on a seven-team parlay where every
team was -110, you would stand to win $9142.43 on that bet! But, you have to win
seven individual bets to get that payoff which may sound easy but is a lot more
challenging than you might think. This is why you get paid so well for hitting
it.

Thankfully you are not required to stick seven teams on your parlays if you
don’t want to. You can make them only two teams if you’d like if you’ve got two
bets that you are dead set that you’re going to win. If you have a big parlay,
you put together and are not sure on a game, just take it out. You aren’t really
sacrificing anything because the bets are paid out at true odds.