Parlays are becoming more popular and sportsbooks are making billions
Imagine you’re placing a $10 bet on a coin toss.
Do you think the coin will land on heads or tails?
Click the coin to choose your side.
Scroll to continue
This is called a parlay – a single wager that depends on you getting each of the component bets correct. And bettors love parlays.
Americans can’t stop betting parlays. Sportbooks are cashing in.
One glance at an online forum devoted to sports gambling makes it clear: America is obsessed with parlays.
In the sports betting community on Reddit, one person hopes to win big if six different players all score during an NFL weekend. Another celebrates “finally� hitting a four-leg parlay, with more than $600 as the reward; how much they lost in past attempts is unclear. Someone else was convinced: “I’m winning 100k tonight.� (They didn’t.)
Not all the overconfident predictions involve parlays, the massively popular type of wager that offers long odds and big potential payouts by combining individual bets into one with multiple “legs.� But mostly they do.
As mobile sports betting booms, parlays are becoming more popular, accounting for an increasing share of the money wagered on sports, according to a Washington Post analysis of state betting data.
Sportsbooks are cashing in. Bettors lose billions of dollars a year on parlays, the data shows, and operators bring in far more revenue for every dollar wagered on these bets than they do straight bets. In most of the states that publish the relevant data, parlays account for between half and two-thirds of the operators’ revenue.
The allure is part obvious, part insidious: Parlays up the stakes, and the potential bragging rights. They also stretch the entertainment of a wager across multiple games or turn otherwise inconsequential elements of a single game into decisive moments. And parlays provide the illusion of “almost winning� a bet rather than simply losing one.
The sportsbook’s advantage, though, stems not from the long odds but from complicated math that most users never bother to do: As legs are added to the bet, the chance of winning drops faster than the growth of the potential payout.
Michael A. Buzzelli, the director of problem gambling services for the Ohio Casino Control Commission, said he doesn’t think the average sports bettor understands the “terrible� odds of a parlay, or how even if they win the bet, the operators are still generating enormous amounts of revenue off these wagers in the long run.
“Even if they do know — because some probably do, some are pretty savvy — they just don’t care,� Buzzelli said. “Risk-taking is fun. Risk-taking is enjoyable. It’s partially about money, but it’s also about that excitement and thrill of: ‘I got it right. I knew what I was doing.’�
Can you beat the house by betting parlays?
Imagine a five-leg parlay that combines point spread bets. What happens when you repeat this wager dozens or hundreds of times? We’ll randomly generate your profit or loss based on typical odds and assuming you’re average at picking games.
Profit over time
Final gain/loss:
You might get lucky every so often, but it becomes harder to break even as you place more bets. Over time, the sportsbooks are the winners.
On any wager, most sports bettors know the odds given are not “fair� — that mobile operators such as FanDuel and DraftKings, just like Las Vegas sportsbooks and illegal bookies before them, set the odds to maximize profits regardless of outcomes.
For instance, on the most basic football bet — whether the favorite will win by more than the “point spread� — bettors might receive odds of roughly -110 on both sides, meaning they must wager $110 to earn $100. “Fair� odds, or ones that reflect a 50-50 chance of winning, would require betting only $100 to earn $100.
That difference is known as the house edge, or the “juice,� built into all odds. That’s why — over time and collectively, even if they win half of these kinds of bets — consumers lose money betting on sports.
With -110 odds and equal amounts bet on each side of a football point spread, operators can expect to make 4.5 percent of the amount wagered. That’s known as the “hold percentage.� The higher that number, the bigger the sportsbook’s profit.
And the hold percentage is significantly higher on parlays.
Consider a five-leg parlay made up of bets on NFL point spreads with -110 odds on each side. Research from Rutgers shows users win roughly half of point spread bets. On a five-leg parlay, they’d win only 3.1 percent of the time.
If that five-leg parlay was a fair bet without any “juice,� the consumer could wager $100 and earn $3,100. The actual profit still looks enticing but in reality is significantly less: only $2,436.
That’s because as each leg is added to a parlay, the house edge is compounded. And by the time a fifth leg is added, the sportsbook’s expected hold percentage has more than quadrupled from 4.5 percent on one leg to 20.8 percent on five.
Even though the potential payout rises as legs are added, the chances of winning are falling even faster. That’s why operators love them.
Legs
Fair payout
Actual payout
Percent lost
1
$200
$191
5%
2
$400
$364
9%
3
$800
$696
13%
4
$1,600
$1,328
17%
5
$3,200
$2,536
21%
In a statement, a DraftKings executive said parlays “resonate because they move authentically with how people actually experience sports� — across multiple teams, leagues and games at a time. A FanDuel executive said the company offers resources about how odds work and that “wagering is entertainment, not income generation.� He said more than half of parlay wagers on FanDuel are for less than $5, and that “customers understand that these are fun, entertaining bets with a lower likelihood of winning.�
For these sportsbooks and others, the rising popularity of parlays has been a financial boon.
Imagine you are one of 100 people in a sportsbook. Each person bets $100 on a parlay.
That’s $10,000 total.
On a five-leg parlay with -110 odds on each leg, winners would earn a sizable payout. Everyone else would receive nothing, losing their $100 wager. The odds for each leg here correspond with a typical bet on an NFL point spread, and we will assume the people in this sportsbook are average at picking games.
So what happens to the $10,000 wagered? We’d expect only three people to win the parlay, and they’d receive $2,536 apiece, including their original wager and profit.
The 97 other bettors win nothing, each losing their $100 bet.
The sportsbook keeps the rest.
Despite the sportsbook’s significant advantage on parlays, users keep placing these bets.
On a straight bet, that advantage is fairly obvious to users, who can calculate the house edge by comparing the odds on both sides. Parlays are more complicated — and the math is even harder with “correlated� bets, such as whether one team will win and score a certain number of points.
“It’s more risky to drive a car if you don’t know how to drive a car,� Buzzelli said. “So if you don’t know what’s really going on [in a parlay] and you don’t really know where your money’s going, how it’s going in, how it’s coming out, is that more risky just financially? Yes. And then that could start to lead to some other problematic gambling activities.�
Even those who know the risks might not care. Sports bettors tend to take more risks and act more impulsively and confidently than other gamblers, according to research by Shane Kraus and Joshua Grubbs, psychology professors at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and the University of New Mexico, respectively. That confidence leads bettors to think they can win big despite the long odds of a parlay.
“People do all kinds of gymnastics in their head,� said Lia Nower, a professor and the director of the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers. “They think they have a system that’s foolproof. They think they can outsmart random chance.�
As Americans remain infatuated with parlays, operators reap the benefits.
Sports betting, deregulated in 2018, is now legal in 38 states plus Washington, D.C. — and revenue keeps climbing. U.S. sportsbooks pocketed almost $14 billion last year, up 25 percent from 2023, according to the American Gaming Association.
Most states don’t make public how much is wagered specifically on parlays. But in the states that do, the data is clear: Parlays are big business for sportsbooks.
The typical wager on a parlay is small compared to a straight bet, but it adds up. Bettors wager more than $380 million on parlays a month in Illinois, with that number reaching almost $500 million during the 2024 football season. In New Jersey, bettors wager around $300 million on parlays a month. In Maryland, Indiana and Colorado, users bet more than $100 million a month.
Parlays often generate a substantial share of sportsbooks’ revenue, even though only about one-third of money is wagered on these bets. In Maryland, for instance, bettors have spent 36 percent of their sports betting dollars on parlays this year. Those bets are responsible for 67 percent of sportsbooks’ revenue — $315 million into the coffers of FanDuel, DraftKings and others, with the state on pace to top last year’s revenue from parlays.
A Rutgers analysis of New Jersey betting drives home this point. In New Jersey in 2020, bettors lost $1.41 for every dollar won on parlays, compared with $1.16 on point spread bets and $1.10 on under-over bets, according to the analysis, which looked at 138 million bets that year. Parlays accounted for more than three-quarters of the bets placed. (The most recent analysis is from 2020 because the volume of data contributes to a delay in publishing reports.)
In several states, the “hold percentage� for parlays — again, the share of the money wagered kept by sportsbooks — is three or four times higher than for all other bets. In New Jersey this year, for instance, sportsbooks have kept 20 percent of the money wagered on parlays — and 5 percent of all other bets, according to the state’s revenue reports.
Experienced sports bettors, including professional ones, often focus on finding bets with odds they view as favorable. These advantageous bets can be combined into a parlay for a bigger potential payoff.
But most gamblers are no better at placing bets than selecting picks at random, according to several experts, and the massive hold percentage for parlays indicates that for the vast majority of bettors, these wagers favor the operators.
Kraus attributes the rising popularity of parlays to the operators’ heavy — and savvy — promotion of them. He pointed out how sportsbooks tailor a suggested parlay to fit a fan’s interests, and how building a parlay is easy. On the websites for operators such as DraftKings and FanDuel, if a user clicks on multiple bets, there is automatically an option to combine them into a parlay — a frictionless invitation to give the house an even bigger edge.
Parlays are particularly popular among young people. Standard parlays accounted for 82 percent of all wagers for bettors age 21 to 24 in New Jersey in 2020, the most recent year that data is available. That share for parlays declines with age.
“We know parlays are riskier,� said Buzzelli, who oversees efforts to educate college students in Ohio about responsible gambling. “What do 21- to 24-year-olds like to do? Risky things.�
The lure of a parlay isn’t all about the money. It’s being able to say, “I told you so,� according to Buzzelli. It’s the feeling that “I predicted correctly what would occur, which means I’m smarter than you, which means I know the game better than you.� There’s joy, he said, that comes with getting a prediction correct; with a parlay, that feeling is amplified as a bettor adds legs. Combine that with potential alcohol consumption on a game day, special offers and overconfidence, and parlay mania rolls on.
For somebody who already has a gambling problem, a near miss can activate the brain in a similar way a win would, Kraus said. With parlays, near misses — hitting four out of five legs, for instance — could make a bettor feel closer to the big payout than he really is.
“And when your brain turns on, the ability to reason and to think through it goes down because people are emotionally excited,� Kraus said. “They’re thinking more with their emotional experiences than with the logical side, so odds become less important.�
Bettors also could chase their losses with parlays because the potential payout might seem to be the quickest way to recoup lost money.
Kraus thinks there should be “really good scrutiny with live betting and parlays in the future� and perhaps safeguards, such as spending limits on those types of bets and tools that help bettors understand the odds.
But operators are incentivized to do the opposite. So for now, the math doesn’t matter. Another football Sunday is coming. Why not add that sixth leg?
About this story
Data analysis and reporting by Emily Giambalvo. Design, graphics and development by Kati Perry. Graphics and animations by Aaron Steckelberg. Design contribution by Artur Galocha. Editing by Joe Tone, Meghan Hoyer and Manuel Canales. Copy editing by Jeremy Lang.
Methodology
The Post simulated basic, hypothetical parlays based on several assumptions. We assumed that each leg was a bet on a point spread, and these bets were on independent events. Point spread bets have varying odds, but many have roughly -110 odds on each side, which is the scenario The Post considered. A sports bet with those odds and equal amounts wagered on both sides would have a house edge of 4.5 percent, which is considered typical.
Calculating the expected hold percentage — the share of the total amount wagered that is kept by the sportsbook — is possible only when the probability of winning the parlay is known. The Post assumed bettors had a 50 percent chance of correctly predicting each leg, because multiple experts said most bettors are no better at picking games than if they selected a side at random. In an analysis of all bets, regardless of sport, placed in New Jersey in 2020, Rutgers researchers found that consumers lost 50.3 percent of the time on point spread bets for entire games. The Post’s model also assumed there were no pushes, which happen when the final margin is equal to the point spread and bettors on both sides have their wager returned. Under both those circumstances, bettors would have a 3.1 percent chance of winning a five-leg parlay.
To determine the potential payout, The Post assumed the odds given for a parlay would be equivalent to the multiplied value of the odds of each leg. This is the case when building a parlay on the sites of major operators and according to a parlay explainer on DraftKings’ website. Sometimes sportsbooks offer promotions that improve the odds of the parlay.
The Post also analyzed state-level sports betting reports. States publish gambling reports with varying level of detail and only some designate how much money is wagered or revenue is generated on parlays.
The Post analyzed data available as of Oct. 1 from six states: Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland and New Jersey. All of those states except Louisiana provided data for the total amount wagered. When the amount wagered and the amount paid out to bettors were available, The Post determined revenue based on the difference between the two values. Louisiana reports net proceeds, which accounts for the deductions allowed for promotional offers. The Post did not distinguish between revenue (the amount wagered minus payouts) and taxable revenue, which includes such deductions, when analyzing the percent of revenue that came from parlays.
For Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland and New Jersey, the most recent reports were from August. For Colorado and Illinois, the most recent reports were from July. Maryland began publishing reports when sports betting launched in December 2021 but did not break down the data into categories, including parlays, until June 2023. All of these states except New Jersey provide monthly data. New Jersey reports its categorized data as year-to-date values; The Post analyzed the state’s annual totals, considering only reports from December and the most recent report in 2025.
Data from Illinois and New Jersey reflects “completed events,� which means the values are for wagers that were completed during that time frame even if they were placed earlier.
