Bow Tie Betting Football

Today we are going to discuss some “Moron Exotic” bets. Let’s start if off with the Sweetheart Teaser:

The sweetheart teaser is a simple modified version of the regular good old fashioned teaser. What happens is the more teams you bet the more points you can tease the games and still win a good amount of money. Different sites have different definitions of how many games equals a sweetheart, but on Betus.com it’s a 3 or 4 team bet (which is pretty standard, but I have seen other size bets) where a 10 point tease on a 3 team bet will pay you as much as a 9 point tease on a 3 team bet. Weird right? Yes, yes it is, so if you are going to pick a 3 team teaser and do the 9 point tease, make it a 10 point sweetheart and you make as much money!

Why would the sports books ever allow such a thing? To get you to bet on more than 2 games. The more games you bet on, the harder it is going to be to get it right. As stupid as that sounds, you shouldn’t ever forget that. Remember the lines in the sports books aren’t what they think is going to happen, they are to draw roughly equal wagering on both sides so they make a little over 9% on all money bet. Sweetheart teasers, like the regular teaser, are very hard to say no to, but if your goal is to make money you should always focus on betting a few games as possible and only on the ones you feel sure about.

On the subject of moron Exotic bets let’s talk about the Pleaser. Here is what the pleaser is, instead of getting points towards your team, like you would on the teaser, you are giving points away to the other side for a much larger payout. It’s dumb, and I’m not really that excited to talk about it. I don’t suggest EVER doing it:

It goes like this, you give up 3, 6, 6.5 or 7 points from your spread, So pretend you picked Buffalo at -3 AND NIU at +8 and decided to give away 6.0 points, the lines just moved to:

Buffalo – 9.0

NIU +2

And your pay out would be something like 6/1, so you’d make $120 on a $20. They don’t make the payouts that big because it’s easy to win.
And those are the exotic bets you could make when betting on college football. There are some others out there, but they are a little more rare than the ones I talked about above, and I don’t suggest betting those if you never have before.
Check in on Monday for my Picks, and the computers sim, for week 1 of the college football season!

The Teaser is the next bet we are going to discuss. Once again it is a single bet (So going with our original $20 example it will still just be a $20 bet) where you pick the winners of anywhere from 2 to 15 games keeping in mind the spread. Sounds just like the parlay right? But there is a Twist!

The teaser allows you to “tease” the line by a varying degree of points. For a teaser there are 4 options of point “teases” they are;

6 Points

6.5 Points

7 Points

7.5 Points

8 Points

8.5 Points

9 Points

The more points you tease the line the less you get paid out. When you tease the line by any of the above points you move the line in your favor for each game by the number you chose.

Let’s use the Buffalo game as an example again, they are -3 vs. UTEP, if we were to create a teaser that included Buffalo we could shift the line in our favor by whatever number we choose. Let’s pretend we pick 7.5 as our “tease”, our new line for the Buffalo game would be Buffalo +4.5. We were able to move them from the favorite to an underdog just like that. But not so fast my friend, there is more to this bet than meets the eye.

You have to pick at least 2 games, and the more games you pick the more you get paid. So to review, the lower point “tease” you pick the more you make, and the more games the more you make. I have an idea, I’ll post a fun chart:

You can see the payouts for the # of teams and the amount of points you teased the line. Fun chart right? Teasers are personally one of my favorite bets to make on college football, as long as you aren’t a crazy person. Consider this, you pick 3 teams tease the line 8 points, you still make 1/1 (so you make as much as you bet). A 100% gain isn’t bad for a days work right?

Come back tomorrow when we have some crazy “specialty” bets that we talk about. We will also touch on the “sweetheart” teaser tomorrow.

What is a parlay? A parlay is a single bet (So in this case still just $20) where you bet on more than one game and all games you pick must be correct. The same basic rules of the “straight wager” apply. You have to pick the correct teams against the spread, but the payouts are going to be very different.

The payout numbers aren’t going to matter (ignore the -110) but the point spread still will. Betus.com will allow you to have up to a 15 team parlay, but you can do as few as a 2 teams. The payout table is as follows:

So the more teams you pick the more money you make, which was pretty obvious but I felt the need to state it anyway. Seems simple right? All you have to do is go 8 for 8 on your sports picks and you win 100 times what you bet! The Parlay is what I would call an expert bet (Or a fools bet). If you aren’t 100% sure on all of your picks don’t do it. Anyone can pick the straight up winner of 8 games, but with the spread it’s an extremely hard bet, that’s why they pay you 100 to 1. Remember, as the theory goes, lines makers put the lines at what they are so that 50% of the people will bet one way and 50% will bet the other. So basically with the lines what they are you have a 50/50 chance of getting a game right because of the line. Now try flipping a coin 3 times and calling the correct outcome each time. Yeah…it’s like that. (Of course that over simplifies it all, but I think it proves a pretty good point.)
Tomorrow we are going to discuss the Teaser (A modified, and much friendlier version of the Parlay).

This is something I think we should get into before we make any offical picks. What’s the point of picking games if you have no idea what I am talking about? So we are going to review the bets and the sucker bets this week:

Let’s start with the basics, the “Straight Wager”. Here is what the straight wager is, you take or give the points on the team you pick to win. So let’s use UTEP and Buffalo in week 1 as an example:

The line is

Buffalo -3 -110

-3 is the point spread. So whatever Buffalo has as their final score, you subtract 3 from it (The reverse is also true, if you bet on UTEP whatever their final score is add 3 points), and if they still have more points than their opponent (UTEP in this case) you win. And the -110 is the payout (or money line). The Payout, or money line, tells you how much you have to bet to win 100 bucks. A minus, as in -110, means you have to bet 110 to win 100, and a +, as in +110, shows you how much you would win if you bet 100.

Here’s an example game:

Pretend we bet $20 on Buffalo at -3

And the results were…

UTEP – 21

Buffalo – 27

We would have won. So that means we would have won $18.18 on a $20 bet, bringing our total bank to $38.18.

Easy right?

The “Straight Wager” is one of the easiest bets to understand, all you have to do is pick the winner taking into account the spread. The thought being that Vegas makes the lines so that half the bettors take Buffalo and half take UTEP so they win roughly 9.09% of the money wagered on any given game. This isn’t always the case, but more on that later.

Next up we have “Parlays”!

Come back tomorrow for the rules of the Parlay and what to look for!