Last week I talked about the rollercoaster type swings that are involved with a round-robin parlay and how quickly things can change. Going into Week 5, the parlays were down almost $27. But after two winning weeks in a row, we are now up over $24.
That’s the variance involved with this type of betting. Do I expect to be closing in on a 20 percent return on investment? Absolutely not. Would I be shocked if we continued the trend of losing two weeks, winning two weeks and so on? Not at all. But over a long enough time period and a big enough sample (it would probably take a few seasons to get anywhere close to have a sufficient sample size), these will come out ahead because of the positive expected values of the bets involved in the parlays.
Season record: 10-56, +$24.60, +18.6% ROI
As mentioned above, I don’t expect to hit anywhere near this ROI at the end of the season but maybe things can swing our way over the final two months of the season and we can finish with a nice profit.
The underdog parlay has done well for us so we are going to keep it rolling this week. Why change what isn’t broken?
I think these five bets all have value — or close to it — according to my college football projection model and I am going to place them in a round-robin parlay. (You can find all of my Week 7 college football projections here.)
The bets:
- USC moneyline (+140) vs. Penn State
- Virginia moneyline (+225) vs. Louisville
- Arizona moneyline (+135) at BYU
- Oregon moneyline (+130) vs. Ohio State
- West Virginia moneyline (+125) vs. Iowa State
A simple parlay would have all five of these bets together for odds of +9385. That means if you bet $1, you’ll win $93.85. This will be one part of our parlay, but sportsbooks have a feature called round robins that will automatically parlay different combinations.
On BetMGM’s interface, you’ll scroll down your bet slip to see that section. I’ll be selecting “Round Robin 2/5.” This selection parlays each bet with another bet, creating 10 two-game parlays (11 parlays total if you include the five-game parlay above). I’m going to be staking $2 on every bet in this process for a grand total of $22.
The round-robin parlays:
- USC/Virginia/Arizona/Oregon/West Virginia (+9385) — $2 to win $187.72
- USC/Virginia (+680) — $2 to win $13.60
- USC/Arizona (+464) — $2 to win $9.28
- USC/Oregon (+452) — $2 to win $9.04
- USC/West Virginia (+440) — $2 to win $8.80
- Virginia/Arizona (+665) — $2 to win $13.28
- Virginia/Oregon (+647) — $2 to win $12.95
- Virginia/West Virginia (+631) — $2 to win $12.63
- Arizona/Oregon (+440) — $2 to win $8.80
- Arizona/West Virginia (+429) — $2 to win $8.58
- Oregon/West Virginia (+417) — $2 to win $8.35
(Photo of Zachariah Branch: Michael Owens / Getty Images)
