Round-Robin Betting Strategy

Content curated from and authored by Clear Data Sports

If you’ve been to the racetrack and bet a trifecta, but you weren’t exactly sure in which order those three horses would finish, you probably boxed the trifecta - meaning that you paid to make a bet that would account for any combination of possible finishes.

Round-robin betting is a similar strategy in sports betting, although instead of boxing your horses, you’re boxing various parlay combinations. You’re covering all your bases, which, in essence, makes this another form of hedging your bets.

How Round-Robin Betting Works

Let’s say you are betting on NFL games, and you have three teams you really like. Once you decide how much you are willing to spend on those matchups, then you can place your bets. The three teams you’ve chosen to bet are Buffalo -4.5, Minnesota -7.5, and Arizona +7.5.

We’re going to create three two-team parlays that look like this:

Buffalo (-4.5) and Minnesota (-7.5)

Buffalo (-4.5) and Arizona (+7.5)

Arizona (+7.5) and Minnesota (-7.5)

We feel good about these bets, so we’ve put $100 down on each parlay, which pays $260 + $100 of the original bet if they win.

Holy moly, wouldn’t you know it, you hit on all three bets. That’s $780 in pure profit. Well done!

But let’s say you hit on only two of the three bets because we want to be realistic. You still profit $420 ($520 in profit for the two wins minus $100 on the losing bet). A profit of $420 is a mighty fine haul, and a far better take then if you’d bet on all three teams as individual bets for $100 each. In that case, your profit would be $100.

But even if you only hit on one of three parlays, you still make money. You get $260 in profit for the winning bet, which covers the two losing bets and still leaves you with $60 in net gain. If you bet all three games as individual bets, you would be in the hole $100 by only winning one.

When using the round-robin strategy in this instance, the only way you can lose is if all three parlays come back losers. You profit if only one wins, if two win or all three win.

Round-Robin Betting Rules

Some sportsbooks will allow you to automatically round-robin your bet. Typically, they will require that you include at least three teams in the round-robin, and no more than eight.

An unwritten rule, but one that is very important, is that you only pick the same winner for each bet. If you’re going with the Vikings in one bet, don’t try to get creative by picking their opponent in another of the bets.

That will actually lower your odds of winning. For this strategy to work, you must bet on the same winners for each of your parlays.

You can add more teams and more bets, as mentioned above. But when it comes to giving yourself the best possible chance to win, the two-team, three-way parlay gives you the greatest odds.

CORRECTION ALERT

Last week I wrote about the Round Robin betting strategy, and in my excitement about covering all of our betting bases, I erroneously wrote that when making your three two-team parlays, you might win two of those bets. This is, of course, impossible, since every team in your round-robin is involved in two bets, and if only one team loses, two bets lose.

In updated math, with a $300 bet on the three parlays:

Winning all three would net $780 in profit.

You can’t win two parlays despite my best efforts to make it so.

Win one parlay, and you win $60 in profit.

Losing all three parlays still remains the only way a round-robin bet finishes as a loser.