Parlay betting is betting on a number of independent events such as football matches where the earnings from the first bet are automatically bet on the second event. Another name for parlay bets is accumulators. For instance, if you bet on a simple parley £1 that team A wins at 3/1 and on that team B wins at 2/1, then following a successful outcome for team A, your original stake plus your winnings (a total of £4) is placed on team B and if that wins then you collect £12 which is not a bat return for a simple £1 bet.
Of course parlays can include far more than just 2 events; any number of events is a possibility. The more events there are the more you will win if successful, but your chances of doing so are reduced considerably by each additional leg.
There are a number of parlay strategies you can use to improve your chances of winning and one is hedging your bet. Say that you have placed a four leg parlay at odds of leg 1: 3/1; leg 2: 4/1; leg 3: 5/1; leg 4: 4/1. Your stake is £1.0 and you win legs 1, 2 and 3. So far you potential return is the £4.0 from leg 1 which is converted to £20 on leg 2 which is then converted to £120 on leg 3. Now you might be getting a little jumpy that on leg 4 you could lose all of that money. What you could do is visit a betting exchange such as Betfair and hedge your final bet by laying a bet against it thus reducing your risk but of course also reducing your potential winnings.
Another very interesting parlay strategy is to find events that have a degree of dependency. For instance, consider the group stages of the World Cup. Although there is not a physical or mathematical dependency between the games, there might be a psychological dependency. For instance it could be that if team A lost a match, then team B would qualify if it won their next match. But if team A won, then team B would be eliminated whether they won or lost. If you bet a parlay on team A winning and team B losing or team A losing and team B winning, then you would be leveraging the likely situation that if team A won, team B would be less motivated to win than if team A lost.
With parlay betting strategy you should always look for an edge; an advantage that the bookmaker has failed to spot.
