How to Use the Positive EV Tool to Place Profitable Parlays

Ordinarily, parlays rake in profits for the sportsbooks. In fact, through most of 2021 the state of New Jersey had made $608 million off of its bettors. $335 million, or over half of that profit, had come from parlays.

This is because when a parlay is placed, the edge (or lack thereof) is compounded for each leg of the parlay. So on a standard -110 bet, the sportsbooks have that ten cents of edge.

If a five-leg parlay is placed then that edge the sportsbooks have compounds five times, putting the odds in favor of the books.

The way to beat this and make profitable parlays is to make all legs of the parlay positive expected value, or +EV. If all legs are +EV, then your edge will start compounding instead.

So, how can you use OddsJam’s positive expected value tool to build your mathematically profitable parlays?

Obviously, you’ll have to find positive expected value opportunities on the same sportsbook.

Here’s a screenshot of the top of my positive expected value page.

If I wanted to build a parlay, I could head to Caesars and parlay Bradley Beal under 24.5 points with Chris Paul under 31.5 points + rebounds + assists.

You can see the no-vig fair odds for the Beal leg are +100.48, and +103.5 for Chris Paul. Here’s what happens when we put those odds into the OddsJam parlay calculator:

The total odds for the parlay are +307.98, or essentially +308. Now, let’s put the +104 and +106 legs we can get on Caesars into the calculator.

As you can see, our parlay ends up being just over +320, which easily beats the +308 fair odds.

If you don’t want to find your own parlay using the EV page, we also have a parlay builder that can do it for you.

As you can see here, there are several customizable options to make your parlay exactly how you want it while still being mathematically profitable.

Parlays aren’t inherently bad…it’s just the majority of people compound negative value instead of positive value.