NBA: Buying, Selling, Parlaying & Teasing Points
By: Staff Writer - StatFox
Published: 3/25/2008 at 8:35:00 PM
NBA Point Buying – Don’t Do It!

Buying points is a popular play among novice bettors, as they feel they have a comfort level with the added points, even if they are generally paying 10 cents per half-point.

Well, point buying may certainly be worth it when getting on or off key NFL numbers like three and seven, but unlike football, there really are no key numbers in the NBA. Therefore, it is our assertion that you should never buy points in basketball, but rather just go line shopping for the best available number.

To demonstrate how worthless it is to buy points, consider that there have been 21,779 NBA games played since the start of the 1990-91 season. Here are the percentages of games decided by each exact margin from 1 to 10:

Margin: Games (Pct)
1: 919 ( 4.22%
2: 1335 (6.13%)
3: 1273 (5.85%)
4: 1277 (5.86%)
5: 1375 (6.31%)
6: 1348 (6.19%)
7: 1354 (6.22%)
8: 1311 (6.02%)
9: 1251 (5.74%)
10: 1091 (5.01%)

As you can see, the biggest discrepancy is between landing on one and those landing on two, at a difference of 1.91 percent. Besides that, the differenced between the other numbers are less than one percent, yet book charge 10 cents to buy a half-point and 20 cents to by a full point. Since it is obvious that there are no key numbers here, it should also be obvious that point-buying is virtually never worthwhile and is a losing proposition in the long run.

Are NBA Parlays Worth It?

To properly answer this question, you first must get an honest assessment of how good a handicapper you are. If you expect to hit better than 53 percent of your selections in the long run, then yes, we would recommend play two-way round robins with all of your selections. By two-way round robin, we mean boxing every possible two-team parlay using your selections. This, a three-team two-way round robin would be three parlays and a four-team two-way round robin would be six parlays.

But wait, you may ask, aren’t two-team parlays that traditionally pay off at 13/5 odds sucker bets? Well, this is where the true long term expected winning percentage comes in. Many people, including so-called professional bettors, have scoffed at the prospect of playing just one parlay, let alone a round robin of them. Well, we have always maintained that if a handicapper can consistently win, say, 55 percent of his plays in the NBA, then round robins are not only considered an acceptable betting mechanism, but we would actually recommend them,

We feel that people that look at parlays as strictly recreational bets are missing the point. These players assume that every play has a 50 percent probability of winning. Therefore, they contend, the true chances of hitting a two-team parlay are 25 percent (.50 x .50), which is not enough to overcome the standard 13/5 payoff, which has a breakeven point of 27.78 percent. Our thinking is that if a handicapper has a long-term 55 percent (or better) success rate, then it would be proper to assume a 55 percent expectation on each play instead of 50 percent.

Using this criteria, the expected odds of hitting a two-team parlay would now be 30.25 percent (.55 x .55), which would show a long-term profit at 13/5 odds. To illustrate, let us say a 55 percent handicapper played 100 $10 parlays. The total investment of these parlays would be $1,000. With a 30.25 percent win rate, this handicapper should hit around 30 of these parlays. Since each winning $10 parlay would have a return of $36, the total return on the 30 winning parlays would be $1,080, translating into an $80 profit and an 8 percent ROI! If the handicapper has a proven long term win rate of 56 percent, 57 percent or higher, his ROI would be exponentially higher.

Now, let's say that a 55 percent handicapper likes three games on a particular day. If he had $300 to invest, should he play each game for $100 straight, or would it be more profitable to play a $100 round robin, investing the same $300? To illustrate this, let us take a look at a series of 300 games, comparing the expectation of playing 300 straight bets with that of playing 300 parlays.

If he played 300 straight bets with a 55 percent win rate, he would win 165 of those bets. With a profit of $91 for each $100 bet, his profit for the series would be (165 x 91) - (135 x 100) = $1,515. Now if he instead played 300 two-team parlays with a 30.25 percent expectation as discussed earlier, he would be expected to hit about 90 of those parlays. His profit for the series would be (90 x 260) - (210 x 100) = $2,400. As you can see, he would have made a significantly better profit playing parlays ($2,400 profit/$30,000 invested = 8 percent ROI) than he would have playing straight bets ($1,515/$30,000 = 5.05 percent ROI).

Now you don’t have to be a 55 percent handicapper for this to work, but rather, just better then 53 percent. If that is the case, then round robins can be very lucrative.

What About Teasers?

Now if you were paying attention to the point-buying section, you probably already know our feeling about teasers.

As you can see, the percent of games that land on exact numbers does not vary by much, yet a teaser requires you to win at least two games moving the spread to your advantage with minimal payouts. While it seems inviting to turn a seven-point favorite into a one-point favorite or a five point underdog into am 11-point dog, the fact remains that the added points will not make a difference enough times in the long run, in the absence of key numbers that is, to compensate for the times you would have won without the teased points. The fact that you need multiple teams to complete the teaser only compounds this fact.

Selling Points

On a final note, with Pinnacle no longer servicing American customers, sportsbooks that allow you to sell points in the NBA are now an endangered species. And why exactly do you think that is?

For the exact same reason that you should not buy points in the NBA, professional bettors have made a killing by selling points, so books are frightened out of their minds to offer this option! This goes back to the percentage of games landing on specific numbers again, and if the value of a point in basketball is relatively small, then it logically follows that selling points to get you wagers to plus odds is a viable option.

We used this strategy with great success in the past, and we are hoping (most likely against all hope) that some book brings back this option in the future.