If you’ve watched any professional sports this year, chances are you’ve seen ad after ad pushing parlay bets. WSJ’s Katherine Sayre explains how parlays became big business for sports betting companies. Further Listening: - How a Psychiatrist Lost $400,000 on Gambling Apps - Disney Gets Into Gambling Further Reading: - America Has Fallen in Love With Long-Shot Sports Bets - This Year’s Big NFL Winners: Fans, Not Sportsbooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Alex Haberkern is 29 years old. She tends a bar at a casino in Atlantic City. And despite being surrounded by gambling, or maybe because of it, she doesn't consider herself a big gambler.
When you work in the industry, it's kind of hard to want to go back and just like be there casually too. Like I do go to the casino occasionally, but I wouldn't say that gambling would be my favorite thing just because I see it every day.
There is one thing she really loves betting on, though. Football games, using apps like FanDuel and DraftKings. And one Sunday last December, Alex made a particularly wild bet.
It was before I was going to work, and I had like a free $10 bonus. It was like a last-minute thing that I was like, it expired if you didn't use it. So I was like, okay.
Alex started stringing together a complicated sequence of bets. She bet that Justin Jefferson of the Minnesota Vikings would get 80 receiving yards, that James Cook of the Buffalo Bills would score a touchdown. In the Steelers-Bengals game, she bet that both Jamar Chase and Najee Harris would find the end zone.
And then the rest just kind of kept going. Most of them were just scorers. Derrick Henry needed 80 yards. Saquon Barkley needed 80 yards. Jalen Hurts had to score. Kyron Williams had to score. And then, of course, Cooper Cupp needed 70 yards.
Alex wasn't just betting that these things would happen individually. She was making a bet called a parlay. For Alex to get a payout, all 14 of those things needed to happen. And the odds of all of those things happening were long. Very, very long. Like 66-yard field goal long. But if the parlay worked, the payout would be massive.
Let me see the exact payout. Hold on. It was $21,921. Almost $22,000 off a free $10 bonus bet? That's like life-changing money to me. I'm planning a wedding. We're looking to build a house. Like, that could do a lot for me. So I was like, it's a free bet. We'll risk it. 100%.
100%. I was like, this is so stupid. And I tell my fiance my bets every week when I place them because he puts a couple things together, but it's very small. He does very realistic things. And I'm like, oh, you want to hear the stupidity I have going today? And that's basically how it is. But sometimes you get lucky. Yeah.
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