Parlay

Parlay

A parlay, accumulator (or acca), combo bet, or multi is a single bet that links together two or more individual wagers, usually seen in sports betting. Winning the parlay is dependent on all of those wagers winning together. If any of the bets in the parlay lose, the entire parlay loses. If any of the plays in the parlay ties, or "pushes", the parlay reverts to a lower number of wagers with the payout odds reducing accordingly. Parlay bets are high-risk, high-reward; linking the possibilities drastically reduces the chance of the bet paying off overall. The benefit of the parlay is that there are much higher pay-offs, although as usual, casinos and bookkeepers offering parlays often exploit the poor calculation of gamblers by not increasing the pay-out as much as the odds truly demand, with the effect of the house edge increasing in parlays. Although a variety of bets can be used to build a parlay bet, correlated parlays are usually not allowed at betting sites. Correlated parlays are two or more bets from the same game that rely on a closely related outcome: for example, betting that a football (soccer) team might both score more than three goals in a match, and also win the match. These are not independent events, as a team that scores more than three goals is also very likely to win the match. A naive application of odds that treated these events as uncorrelated would not accurately reflect the probability of the linked bet.

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