Every bet on the Super Bowl involves risk and reward but Super Bowl teasers help you manage your risk, while helping to maximize your reward.
Since combination bets are inherently riskier than single bets, the Super Bowl teaser is a popular way for bettors to help their Super Bowl parlays get into the winner’s circle.
How does a Super Bowl teaser work?
When you add a teaser to your parlay, you will be adjusting the point spreads and/or totals so that your selected outcomes have a greater chance of coming true. In exchange, you’ll receive a lower payout when you win.
The teaser applies to every game on your parlay card; in football, you can have either a 6-point teaser, a 6.5-point teaser, or a 7-point teaser.
Let’s go back a couple of championships to Super Bowl XLVI. Let’s say you were looking to bet a Super Bowl parlay with the New England Patriots at –2.5 on the point spread, combined with the under on the total of 53, but you just weren’t that confident about the Patriots covering the spread.
Instead, buying a 7-point teaser would have changed your parlay to Patriots +4.5 and UNDER 60. You would have won when the Patriots lost by four points to the New York Giants 21-17.
In this case, a two-team, 7-point teaser pays out at –130, meaning you would have had to bet $130 to win $100 on your (winning) Super Bowl teaser, instead of betting $100 to win $260 on your (losing) original parlay. That’s risk management in a nutshell.
Why is the magic number of 3 important in Super Bowl teasers?
The best times to use the teaser in football are when the point spread is moving across the “magic number” of three, as it did in the above example when New England was teased from –2.5 to +4.5. More NFL games are won by a field goal than any other margin.
Seven is also a magic number in football, since a converted touchdown is the second-most common margin of victory.
Use the teaser judiciously when betting on the Super Bowl, and you’ll get ahead in your wagers.