In layman terms, a teaser is a parlay bet that uses modified point spreads. In football, the most common modification is six points. So let’s say this week there are two bets you like: Jets -7.5, Raiders +1.5. Rather than betting these straight or in a parlay, you could make a two team six point teaser bet of Jets -1.5, Raiders +7.5. To win the bet, you’ll need both teams to cover. Teaser odds vary from site to site. When betting six point football teasers, you want to find NFL 2 team 6 point teasers at -110 or better. The rules for pushes are generally the same at each site. If a leg in a teaser pushes while any other leg is a loss, the teaser bet is graded a loss. A push and a win would result in no action and bets are refunded.
Let’s use 2 team 6 point (-110) teasers. As you might already know, to break even at -110 you need to win 52.38% of your bets. The formula used to calculate this is risk divided by return, where return equals stake plus win. For example, a bettor risks $110 to win $100, the return is $210, so the math here is $110 risk/$210 return=0.5238 which is 52.38%. This is how often “both” legs of a teaser must win for the bet to be break even. In order to do any sort of statistical analysis of teasers, we need to ask ourselves “how often must each leg individually win to achieve a 52.38% win rate?” To calculate this, what we need to know is what number times itself equals 0.5238. Using a square root calculator, we find 0.7237 x 0.7237 = 0.5238. This means that each individual leg must win 72.37% of the time on average for the teaser bet to have break even expectation. To keep from getting math intensive, I’ll simplify things and tell you to Google search “Money Line Converter”, plug in 72.37%, and see in American odds format that this equates to a money line of -262.
We’ve now deciphered a two team six point teaser at -110. What we have is a two team parlay at -262 per team. The bookmaker sold us six points and charged us 152 cents (from the standard -110) for those points. After running this math I get 72.37% for how often individual legs must win for the 2 team -110 teaser to break even.
Basic NFL 6 point teaser strategy is to use +1.5 to +2.5 underdogs and -7.5 to -8.5 favorites. Notice in both of these teaser options that when moving the spread six points, you’re capturing a win on what would have been a loss: four of the six most common margins of victory including the top two (3, 7, 6 and 4).
Breaking down the teaser results into four subsets here are the results since 2004:
Home favorites -7.5 to -8.5 teased to -1.5 to -2.5 = 76% (profitable)
Road underdogs +1.5 to +2.5 teased to +7.5 to +8.5 = 71% (not profitable)
Home underdogs +1.5 to +2.5 teased to +7.5 to +8.5 = 78% (profitable)
Road favorites -7.5 to -8.5 teased to -1.5 to -2.5 = 80% (profitable)
So as you can see three of the four are profitable.
But, the sportsbooks are there to try and make money so what some of them have started doing is “line shading” so that you can’t get these numbers to tease up or down 6 points.
You can’t just follow this blindly. You will still have to handicap the games as you normally would. I hope this adds to you arsenal against the bookmaker this season.