Parlay cards
A parlay card is a printed sheet of the week's games with a line on each, a payout table at the bottom and the rules on the back. You mark your picks, hand it in with your money, and every pick has to win. It is the oldest parlay there is, and the price is usually the worst on the board.
How a card works
The book prints the card early in the week, most often for football, with a point spread or a total next to every game. You choose how many picks to play, usually from three up to ten or more, mark them, and pay the stake. The lines on the card don't move. Whatever the number was when the card was printed, that's your number, even if the line on the board has gone a field goal the other way by Sunday.
That sounds like a gift, and occasionally it is one. The book knows it, which is why cards come with a maximum stake, a cut-off time, and the right to take a game off the card if the line moves too far. Books protect a fixed price the way you'd expect.
Some local bookies ran a card every week too, and plenty of office pools still do. The mechanics are the same. The payout table is whatever the person printing it decided.
"For" and "to"
Read the payout table carefully, because one word on it changes the price. Say the card pays 6 for 1 on three picks. "For" means the stake is counted in the payout: you hand in $1, and you get $6 back, which is a profit of $5. A card paying 6 to 1 would return $7. The table looks generous until you notice which word it uses.
Here is a sample table in the "for" style, with $1 on each, against what the ticket would pay if every pick were a coin flip, which a point spread is built to be.
| Picks | Card pays | Profit | Fair profit | Book keeps |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | 6 for 1 | $5 | $7 | 25.0% |
| 4 | 11 for 1 | $10 | $15 | 31.3% |
| 5 | 22 for 1 | $21 | $31 | 31.3% |
The table is an example, and every card sets its own. The method works on any of them: the fair profit on a card of coin flips is 2 to the power of the picks, minus 1. Do that sum before you play. For comparison, an ordinary parlay at -110 a leg keeps about 13 percent on three teams and 17 percent on four. The card is the dearer way to bet the same games.
The back of the card
The rules decide more than the lines do. The two to read first are about ties.
Some cards say ties lose. A pick that lands exactly on the number counts as a loss, and the whole card goes with it. Cards with that rule often print whole numbers on purpose, because a push is more likely on a whole number than on a half. Other cards say ties reduce: the pushed pick drops off and the card is paid at the next level down, so a four-pick card with a push is paid as a three-pick card. Some say a tie on a card of a certain size is a loss and on a larger card a reduction. Whichever it is, it's in print, and it is worth the thirty seconds before you hand the card in.
The other rules to check are the cut-off for each game, what happens to a postponed game, and whether the card pays a consolation for nine of ten. A few do. Most don't.
Where I'd find the value
The one real edge a card offers is a stale number. If a line has moved two points since the card was printed and you agree with the move, the card's number is better than the market's. A player who checks the board against the card on a Saturday and picks only the games where the card is behind is doing the only sensible thing a card allows. Play four of those and the payout table is still against you, but less than it looks.
For everyone else, a card is a cheap, long sweat for a few dollars. I never had anything against that. I'd just keep it to a few dollars, fixed, out of the bankroll you set aside for fun, and check what the same picks would pay as an ordinary parlay with the parlay calculator. The difference is what the card costs you for the paper.