Americans are betting more than ever on sports, but it turns out that many are treating it like a lottery, gunning for longshots in the form of parlays. According to a recent report, these multileg wagers are padding sportsbooks’ bottom lines more so than single bets.
The Wall Street Journal reports that 27% of cash wagered in Illinois, New Jersey, and Colorado in 2024 through October came in the form of parlays, an increase of 5% since 2021. However, these wagers accounted for 56% of revenue after payouts, up 6% since 2021.
“Multileg bets are so lucrative that FanDuel parent company Flutter Entertainment recently increased its expectation for total online gambling revenues in the U.S. to $63 billion by 2030, up from its estimate of $40 billion two years ago, driven in part by parlays,” the Journal noted.
Many less-serious gamblers enjoy making multi-leg parlays with the promise of a blogger payout should everything go as hoped. These bets may be smaller with the chance of a big payout in the end, but some gamblers don’t view them as serious handicapping.
“There’s always the chance, there’s always the point-one-percent chance that it does hit, and I think that’s what keeps people coming back,” sports-betting analyst Lucy Burdge told the newspaper.
Serious sports betting experts advise bettors to generally avoid these types of bets because of the long odds they face in winning them. If bettors are just going to end up hedging when the parlay money gets big, then betting those legs as single games usually offer a better chance at winning in the long run.
Billions of dollars will be bet on the Super Bowl, and all sports betting continues to grow in popularity and was a key driver of U.S. casino revenue in the third quarter of 2024. Americans bet $30.3 billion on sports during that time, generating $3.24 billion in quarterly revenue, up 42.4%.
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