It’s that time again folks! Football is near and many people will be depositing money into their local sportsbooks to begin their NFL and college football betting season! Since PASPA was reprieved, more and more sports books are looking to get your dollar and make their own bet that you will not be profitable. The competition for your dollar is so great, that these books offer large free deposit incentives to attract your business. Some incentives are just money where you have to roll your deposit over 10 to 20 times before you are allotted a payout, which can be very time consuming, and some books just give you a free bet deposit bonus to give you a chance to start your season ahead in the black. Now as we all know with sports, no bet is guaranteed and we do not have to look back very far for that when just last season the New York Jets beat the LA Rams in LA on week 15 as a +17 point dog. No bet is completely safe in this business, so it’s better to make sure that you retain some money rather than chance it all on one shot. Do you like guarantees? I like guarantees and the way that I look at it is that a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush. Here is how we are going to guarantee a payout from a free bet.
The average deposit bonus that sports books give out are about $500 with a $1000+ deposit so I am going to use that number, but please feel free to plug in your own numbers respectfully. Instead of making one single bet with that $500, the best way to do it is by staggering a parlay. A staggered parley means that you bet two teams in your parlay that play at two different times, for example you could bet the Bears game on Sunday at 1PM ET with the Giants game on Monday night. We are going to use the normal -110 juice in our calculations being that most football betting lines are going to be at or close to these numbers. After the parlay bet has been made, we then must bet or “hedge” the other side at the -110 juice in order to guarantee a profit. If your hedge loses, then you have to bet even more money on the opposite side in the second game to cover your first hedge and also make the same profit. How do I know how much to bet you ask? Well, guessing unfortunately is a more difficult option because you could go into negative maximized value quite easily and blowing your own money in order to cover your free parlay isn’t fun. This is why we have an equation to help us which is called the maximum profit equation. X + Y + Z = your total payout.
A -110 juiced two team parlay pays at 2.64X so for that $500 the payout would be approximately $1320.00. In this equation, the X and Y are the variables that relate to each other, and the Z is your total of the two variables with respect to the rate (which we know as -110 or 1.1). For us, the Z is your second bet (If needed since your first leg of the parlay could lose), the X is your first bet and Y is your guaranteed profit. 
Being that we are solving for Y to find a maximum guaranteed profit, I am going to transpose it as your total payout of 1320.00 – Z – X = Y since we are solving for Y to find our maximized profit. Now we know that Y is just the result of what you are betting for X over the juice of -110 or 1.1 for math purposes (because it is the most that you can make without sacrificing chance) and Z is basically (X + Y) times your rate of 1.1 in order to get your second bet. (X+Y)1.1 as stated.
$1320 – Z – X = Y
Y = X/1.1
Z = (X + Y)1.1
After seeing what Y and Z are we can simply input those expressions into our equation as $1320 – (X + X/1.1)1.1 – X = X/1.1 in order to simplify. Doing the algebra, we have $1320 – 2.1X – X = X/1.1 and for the next step we multiply the 1.1 on both sides and get $1452 – 3.41X = X. When we solve for that, we get $1452 = 4.41X and then X ends up equaling $329.25. This is the amount of your first bet at -110 to get your maximized profit $299.32. This is how much you will make no matter what happens! $299.32 is your GUARANTEED profit. The equation looks like $1320 – $691.42 – $329.26 = $299.32.
In summary, if your first hedge (bet) of $329.32 wins, you will get paid $299.32 while your parlay loses. If your first hedge wins, then you must bet $691.42 to get paid $628.56 and minus out your first bet of $329.26, and you get about $299.30 (it would be $299.32 if we used all of the decimals and didn’t round). Finally, if you lose both hedges of $691.42 and $329.26, you then have won your $500 parlay and got paid $1320.00. Minus out the losing hedge best $1320 – $691.42 – $329.26 and you get $299.32. So there you have it. You can guarantee $299.32 cents based on playing it smart by using a staggered parlay. Should you have any questions, please feel free to tweet me @TheOddsbreakers or @OBKiev. Have a wonderful betting season and best of luck this year!
