Boxing Parlay Bets
By Loot, Boxing Handicapper, Lootmeister.com
A parlay is where you pick two or more fights. A winning parlay means you won all all of the picks. While more risky than the straight bet, the parlay should have a place in your boxing betting repertoire. A lot of different sentiments and circumstances give way to making the parlay a desirable pick. Perhaps you are in Vegas and want to take a stab at winning a big bet. Maybe there are a couple big favorites you would like to bet, but your bankroll won’t allow you to make a sizable enough bet to make the profit worthwhile. In both instances, a parlay bet opens up some different options for you.
Parlaying Favorites
Let’s say you want to bet on Manny Pacquiao, but you see he is -650. Are you prepared to bet $130 in order to win a piddly $20? Now take that same $130 and make a parlay. Maybe you feel pretty strongly about Floyd Mayweather beating Miguel Cotto. Mayweather is also a huge favorite at -600.
Instead of your $130 bet standing to win only $20, you now stand to win about $45. That’s not a huge amount, but a $45 profit is easier to live with than a $20 win. And that’s an extreme example, involving a pair of massive favorites who you can almost expect to win. Let’s use another example:
Say a couple favorites you really like are defending against tough challengers. The guy you want to bet on is -340. A $100 bet won’t even net you a $30 profit. On the same card, another favorite is going off at -280. If you were to parlay those two selections and wager the same $100, your profit goes up to $75–making it a much more worthwhile investment of your time, money, and thoughts.
Parlaying Underdogs
This is for the big game hunters. Parlaying underdogs seems like a risky wager and it is to a large degree. In order to make it work, a few things should be kept in mind. First and foremost is that you should commit to this type of play for a certain number of attempts. You’re not going to hit these all the time, so you need to have enough trial runs in the sample pool to see if it will work for you. Trying it once or twice and losing is no indication that you’re not any good at this.
The return on bets like these is so great that you only need to win a small percentage in order to be considered good at it. The urge might be to look for massive underdogs, but only slight to moderate underdogs need to be selected to make these types of bets massive winners. It’s not necessary to get crazy on it–just pick a couple modest underdogs.
Let’s assume you are watching a card on HBO and think the two underdogs have a great chance of winning. One underdog is a +330 underdog and the other is a modest +160 dog. That basically amounts to a 3-1 and an 8-5 underdog. Not easy, but certainly not unheard of. A $100 parlay would earn you over $1000! And you needn’t wait forever to see these results take place. 2-1 and 3-1 favorites take losses on a weekly basis. But don’t just blindly take underdogs in hopes of hitting a big parlay. Pick your spots.
Hitting underdogs in this sport is not easy. Hitting two is downright difficult. At the same time, nobody is asking for Buster Douglas-Mike Tyson-type upsets here. 8-5 favorites bite the dust on a weekly basis and the picture is only slightly more rosy for 3-1 favorites. It’s a sport where the lore is steeped in the frequency of upsets. And for you to make this type of wager successful, you only need to win a few here and there.
It is advisable to make straight bets on each underdog you put on your parlay. Picking underdogs is a feat that should be rewarded–even if you only hit one of two.