At the heart of it, a sports wager is as simple as any gambling proposition can be: I think one team can beat the other team.  If you happen to know someone who likes the other team to win, great; you’ve got a bet.  If not, you need someone to “book” your action.  And that’s where a sports book comes in, be it online, at a casino (only in Las Vegas within the United States) or the guy sitting in the corner of your local tavern or pool hall.  To keep the action flowing, sports books have come up with a huge variety of betting options.

In every betting situation, the sports book attaches an extra price, where they make their profit for providing you with a service.  In normal commerce, this may be called a “processing fee”.  In betting, it’s called vigorish, “the vig”, “juice” or lots of other terms.  As long as the book can balance the action on both sides of the bet, the vig guarantees they will make money.  How the vig is applied depends on the type of bet you make.

Types of bets
Point Spread
Money Line
Totals
Parlay
Teaser
If-bet
Prop Bets
Futures Bets

Note that when you win a bet, you get the amount of your wager back in addition to what you won.  If you wager $110 to win $100, and win the bet, the sports book will hand you $210.  This may seem fairly obvious, but has caused confusion with sports betting novices before, so it will be mentioned now, and then assumed throughout the rest of this guide.

After following all of the above links, you’ll know the basics of sports betting.  I haven’t said anything about how to make smart wagers and make money betting on sports…that’s up to you, and the armies of guys with 900-numbers who offer this week’s 5-Star Lock Of The Year ABSOLUTELY FREE!!  But if you do it right and find what strategies work for you, sports betting can add excitement to watching a game, provide a tremendous “beat the house” challenge, and put a little extra cash in your pocket, all at the same time.

A parlay is the simplest and most popular of what are called the “exotic” bets.  In a parlay, you are placing one wager to win two or more individual bets (either point spread or total bets can work in a parlay).  If I make a two-team parlay, taking New England to cover the spread and go over 47˝ points, and New England wins 45-17, then I win my parlay wager.  If either bet misses, then I lose my wager.  Sports books will allow a large number of bets to be parlayed together (at most places, up-to-12).

In a parlay bet, the book applies the vig by paying out less than the true odds of successfully completing the wager.  As an example, the odds of successfully picking the winner of two wagers is 3:1 against (you can go W-W, W-L, L-W or L-L).  A typical parlay bet pays out 2.6:1…you wager $100 to win $260.  This provides a 13.3% vig to the house.  The more wagers are added in a parlay, the bigger of a sucker bet the parlay becomes.  As an example, here are three different sets of parlay odds.  Book #1 is an online book notorious for offering “bad” odds, Book #2 is known for “good” odds, and a third from a set of “special value” odds:

Note that with a couple of exceptions in the “special” column, no parlay offers you less than the 10% vig you are paying on a standard wager.

A teaser is a special form of a parlay, where you are making one bet on multiple outcomes.  In this case, the house “teases” you with the option of adding points to your spreads in exchange for lower parlay odds.  Most books will allow you to tease a football game 6, 6˝ or 7 points (basketball is usually 4, 4 ˝ or 5 points).  Instead of taking Detroit as a 4˝ point underdog against Chicago, you can tease them to get 10˝, 11 or 11˝ points.  At the “Good” sports book, you can the following teaser payout odds:

Some sports books will also offer straight-up teasers, where they allow the player to add even more points, but drop the payouts to even money.  For example, a 2-team football teaser will usually allow the bettor to adjust each line in the wager by 7 points.  A 3-team football bet can usually be teased 10 or 10.5 points.  Straight teasers are usually limited to 5 or 6 wagers.

As with parlays, the house takes a vig by offering lower odds than is mathematically the case.  It is not as easy to calculate a teaser vig as it is a parlay vig, but as with all exotic bets, the vig is almost always greater than the 10% offered in a straight line bet.

An “if-bet” is a multi-bet wager where you do not have to win every bet to get some payout back.   The if-bet works like this:

You place one bet down on multiple teams, in preferential order.  Let’s say you like the Patriots go over 47˝, and you like the Bears to cover.  You bet $110 to win $100 in your if-bet.  “If” (hence the phrase, the “if-bet”) the Patriots win 52-7, they’ve gone over the total, and you win the first wager.  You get your $100 win back, and the original $110 goes into your bet on the Bears.  You can do an if-bet with up-to-7 games.  If at any time, your chain of bets breaks, everything else is a loss.  The table below, showing four possible wagers from a week in the NFL, demonstrates some of the possible outcomes of your if-bet (each wager is for $110 to win $100):

An if-bet is a reasonable way to play multiple games in a week and still have some semblance of safety in your gambling bankroll.  You can never lose more than your initial $100+10 (whereas if you put $100+10 on each of the four games, you could lose all four wagers and be down up to $440).  On the other hand, you are missing the opportunity to win on the wagers that are “No Bets” if the if-bet chain gets broken.  Look at Scenario #5…if you would have won your bets on the Bears, Rams and Giants, you’d be up $190.  But because the Patriots game was the first in your if-bet chain, you never had that opportunity.

There are two types of if-bets: “if-win” and “if-action”.  In an “if-win” bet, you have to win the bet to continue the chain to the next bet.  In an “if-action” bet, the chain continues if your wager is a push, as well as a win.