What is a teaser bet?
A teaser is a type of parlay, used in American football and basketball, that lets you shift the point spread or total on every leg in your favour in return for a reduced payout.
A normal parlay takes the lines as they come and pays big. A teaser lets you buy points on every leg, making each one easier to win, and pays much less. You still need every leg to win.
Football teasers usually move lines by 6, 6.5 or 7 points. Basketball teasers use 4 to 5. The more points you take, or the fewer teams you include, the lower the payout.
This is a US product. UK and European bookies rarely offer it by name. The nearest thing is building an accumulator from alternative handicap lines.
Example
A two-team, 6-point NFL teaser. A common price is around −120, though it varies by book.
| Leg | Original line | Teased line |
|---|---|---|
| Team A | −8.5 | −2.5 |
| Team B | +1.5 | +7.5 |
You stake $120 to win $100.
- Team A win by 6. That wouldn’t have covered −8.5. It covers −2.5.
- Team B lose by 4. That wouldn’t have covered +1.5. It covers +7.5.
Both legs win and you collect $100 profit. If either leg fails, you lose $120.
Watch out
Those six points aren’t a gift. At −120 you need to win the teaser about 54.5% of the time to break even, which means each leg must win roughly 74% of the time. Six points help a lot, but not always that much.
- Which numbers you cross matters. NFL games often end with margins of 3 and 7. A teaser that moves a line through both (like −8.5 to −2.5, or +1.5 to +7.5) gains far more than one moving −13 to −7. That’s the whole logic of the well-known “Wong teaser”, named after the author Stanford Wong.
- Books know this and have worsened teaser prices and rules over the years.
- Push rules vary. A tied leg might shrink the teaser, refund it or lose it. Read the house rules.
- Basketball and totals teasers are generally poor value, in my view. Scores there are too spread out for a few points to matter enough.