The Dumbest Bet Gamblers Make

If you’ve hung around a Las Vegas casino on a Sunday or Monday afternoon in autumn, you’ve probably seen a particular guy. He bet an eight team NFL parlay, and he hit his first seven games. His last game is the Monday night game.

He’s desperate to sell his ticket. He wanders through the poker room telling everyone he knows about his good fortune and trying to sell for 95 cents on the dollar to anyone who will take it.

If no one buys the ticket, he’ll go back to the sports book and bet the other side of the final game to lock in his win.

A parlay is a way of betting that offers long odds, but big payoffs. Instead of betting on a single game at 11-to-10 payoff odds, you bet three, four, five, six, eight games at once. You have to win every one of your games or you lose your bet. But if you win them all, you get a big payout. The more teams you bet, the bigger the payout.

In most cases, parlays are sucker bets. They’re for fun. I’m not judging. I’ve made sucker bets for fun plenty of times. But this particular guy has made the dumbest bet gamblers make.

Let me explain what he’s done. He bet $100 on eight teams and has to win them all or he loses. He’ll get paid 150-to-1 if he hits all eight. So a winning ticket will be worth $15,100 (including the original $100 bet).

It’s Monday afternoon. Seven of his eight games were played on Sunday, and he won them all. The final game he bet is Monday night’s game.

If you assume he’s roughly 50/50 to win the final game, the ticket’s fair value is $7,550. Boy that’s a lot of money, he thinks. Why not just buy out of the bet now and lock in that win?

So he tries to find someone to buy the ticket. But of course he’s very unlikely to find someone in just a few hours willing to pay him full value for essentially a coinflip. So he offers it for $7,200 or $7,000.

If still no one buys it, he can effectively sell it back to the book by betting on the other side. If he bets $7,900 on the other team (assuming he has $7,900 to bet), then he’ll get a ticket that will pay $15,081.81. Then, no matter what happens, he’ll have a big ticket to cash.

But meanwhile, it’s cost him to hedge away the risk. His total bet is $8,000 (including the original $100), and he’ll get back $15,100 or close to it. That’s a $7,100 win. Hedging with the book is the equivalent of selling his ticket with an expected win of $7,500 for a hair under $7,100. He just paid $400 for peace of mind.

The reason it’s so darn stupid is that he didn’t have to bet that Monday night game in the first place! Instead of betting an eight team at 150-to-1, he could have bet a seven team at 75-to-1. Just bet the Sunday games, leave off the Monday game, and cash a $7,600 ticket. Instead he’s running around like a fool on Monday trying to sell an equivalent ticket at a $400 (or more) discount.

The dumbest bet gamblers make is the one they don’t even want.

It’s also entirely foreseeable. The $7,500 is a big payday for this guy. There is no scenario where he’s going to want to let this bet ride on Monday. If he wins on Sunday, he’s always going to try to lay it off on Monday. He’s made a bet that he will absolutely never want once it materializes. Dumb.

Poker players do this too. The World Series of Poker is coming up, and this happens constantly in the satellites. A player will sign up to play a $1,060 single table satellite. The winner gets $10,000 to buy in to a major event, and everyone else loses.

Many people who play these things start thinking about making a deal as soon as they get about 30 percent of the chips. Some become absolutely desperate to make a deal once it gets heads-up. At that point you’re playing pots worth $5,000 to $10,000 which, frankly, are beyond most poker players’ comfort levels.

So at the end they’ll try to make a deal. If they get turned down, sometimes they’ll offer deals on worse terms for themselves just to lock in the win. I’ve seen players give up over a thousand dollars in equity just to lock in a win.

Don’t do this. It’s really dumb.

Think ahead. If you’re going to be desperate to make a deal as soon as it gets heads-up, do not enter that satellite. Play a smaller one.

People protest this advice. “But there’s less juice at the bigger buy-ins, and the structure is slower.” Both points true, but desperate dealmakers are prone to give all that back and a whole lot more when it counts.

Don’t make the bet you won’t want. If you foresee yourself trying to buy out of the bet, don’t make it in the first place. Make a smaller bet you can live with.

I have one final poker example of people making the dumbest bet gamblers make. The no-limit cash games in Las Vegas allow you to buy in for several hundred times the big blind. For example, you might be allowed to buy in for $1,000 or $1,500 at a $2-$5 game.

I see nitty, nitty players buy in for the maximum. Presumably they do so with the hopes of making the nuts, catching some poor sap with the second nuts, and stacking them. But at many of the tables where I see this, the nits have virtually no chance of getting this payoff. The only other players playing deep with the nits are players sharp enough never to give a nit action.

So then the nit’s stack just becomes a liability. Most of the time, the money never gets into play. And those few times it does get into play, it’s not bet on the nit’s terms. Most of the time, it will be an opponent betting the balance, and the nit will have an excruciating decision.

The moment you put money on a no-limit table, you’ve bet it. Sure, if you buy in deep, most of the time your bet will “push,” and it will be as if you hadn’t put the money on the table. But it’s always in play, and on any given hand you can be very sorry it’s on the table.

If you’re a nit, don’t buy in deep. Unless there’s an absolute drooler at your table set up for a huge stacking, it’s not worth it. You’re asking for action you don’t want, and that’s the dumbest bet a gambler can make. ♠

Ed’s newest book, Playing The Player: Moving Beyond ABC Poker To Dominate Your Opponents, is on sale at notedpokerauthority.com. Find Ed on Facebook at facebook.com/edmillerauthor and on Twitter @EdMillerPoker.