Why Won’t Sportsbooks Let Me Parlay?

Customers are facing increasing problems that their sportsbook won’t allow them to place a parlay bet.

This can be down to a number of reasons, most of which are easily solvable. In most cases, you may have to change your parlay up a bit, either by taking out some of your selections or by adding different ones. At the end of the day, we all want to hit the big odds and have a winning slip to show off to our friends.

Here, we will find out just how you can achieve that, and which sportsbooks are the best for parlay bettors to make their wild predictions at.

Why You Can’t Parlay Certain Bets

You may come across an instance where you think bet online parlay not working. For example, if you use DraftKings, you might get a message stating, ‘sorry, the selected outcomes cannot be combined with DraftKings.’ Well, there is one significant reason why DraftKings won’t let you parlay or any other sportsbook for that matter.

When certain outcomes are considered “correlated,” an operator will not accept a parlay bet. This means the sportsbook believes those bets cannot be parlayed together. Let’s look at a hypothetical example if you wanted to place a parlay on an NFL match:

Let’s say, in this instance, the Tennessee Titans are playing at home against the San Francisco 49ers. You believe that Derrick Henry will have over 4.5 catches, plus 70.5 rushing yards. You want to parlay those two bets, but the sportsbook won’t allow it. Instead, the site will only allow you to place two separate bets on Derrick Henry rushing yards, and Derrick Henry catches.

Rather than making this bet, you choose to wager the over on Henry catches (4.5) and also decide to bet on the Titans to win the game straight up. You again want to parlay these two bets. However, like in the first scenario, the sportsbook will not allow you to parlay these bets, requiring you to place two separate wagers. Instead, you decide to bet the over on Henry while also betting on the Seattle Seahawks to beat the Jacksonville Jaguars, and the sportsbook allows you to parlay these two wagers.

So why won’t the sportsbook let you include two bets on the same game in the same parlay? The answer is quite simple; they want to make as much money as possible. From the sportsbook’s perspective, the two Henry bets and the Henry Titans wagers are both linked. If Henry catches over four passes, there is more chance the Titans will win the game because Henry is one of the best players in the NFL.

So, in the eyes of the sportsbook, they need only to allow bets in a parlay that are utterly unrelated to each other. By doing this, the operators massively increase their chances of winning the parlay. Attempting to predict the results of five entirely separate outcomes is much more challenging than guessing the results of outcomes that are linked in some way.

Same Game Parlay On FanDuel is Not Working

One of the most common questions we come across is ‘why can’t I parlay on FanDuel’, and many queries on the FanDuel same game parlay. Same game parlays on the FanDuel app are one of the operator’s best betting features, but they have been causing a lot of confusion among customers. A lot of players are seeing same game parlays locked or unavailable and thinking this is an error on part of the book. Which, in some cases, it is. Other times it is just that the bet is unavailable as certain outcomes are considered correlated, and, therefore, unavailable as selections and can’t be parlayed together.

The FanDuel same game parlays are actually very good, and generally, we don’t have any issues with them. If the option is locked out, try and sign out, then back in and see if that works. Just remember that the majority of books heavily restrict parlay bets. Why do they do this? Well, as we explained above, they don’t want to give players any more of an edge than they have to.

There is a lot of math and odds at work during a parlay, particularly during a same game parlay, and they won’t all be available. They aren’t necessarily true odds when you bet a same game parlay, the correlated bets get taken into account, and it can and does affects the available odds and outcome.

Fortunately, FanDuel has a Same Game Parlay betting market, in which you can find a range of bets that can be parlayed together. This makes it far easier to place your same game parlay bets, so you can make the most of out each game.

BetMGM Same Game Parlay Builder Problems

Similar to the issues with FanDuel, offering same game parlays is no straightforward task. There are a lot of variables and correlations that happen across parlays, and they won’t always be available. Sometimes this can be a technical issue, and if it is, it’s usually resolved very quickly. Other times this can be because the bets are too closely correlated and therefore not available to be parlayed.

DraftKings Parlay Not Working

Like FanDuel, parlays are extremely popular on DraftKings. However, not everything always goes smoothly. You may be thinking because you are using one of the most prominent sportsbooks in the US, nothing can possibly go wrong. Unfortunately, that is not the case, and there are times we have received messages that DraftKings parlays don’t work on the sportsbook.

One way to avoid placing bets that will correlate and therefore cancel your parlay, is to enable the Same Game Parlay function. This presents you with all the betting markets you can place on a single game, and whenever you pick one, the betting markets that become unavailable are blacked out. Therefore, you will always know which bets go with which other ones.