How Do NFL Teasers Work, and When Are They Worth Betting?

A teaser is a parlay in which you move every point spread (or total) in your favour by a fixed number of points, and accept a smaller payout for it. In football the standard move is 6 points. A favourite at −7.5 becomes −1.5; an underdog at +2.5 becomes +8.5. Every leg must win for the ticket to win.

Whether that is a good trade depends on one thing: does the 6-point move raise each leg's chance of winning by more than the payout cut takes away? For most games it does not. For a narrow set, the ones where 6 points carries you across both 3 and 7, it historically has. That narrow set is what bettors call the Wong teaser, after Stanford Wong, the pen name of the gambling author John Ferguson, whose 2001 book Sharp Sports Betting analysed teasers alongside parlays and props.

How a teaser is priced and settled

A book sets teaser payouts from a fixed chart, not from the games in it. DraftKings' filed house rules, for instance, list regular football teasers of 6, 6.5 or 7 points for two to six teams, allow them only before kickoff, and publish the chart: a 2-team, 6-point teaser pays −135 and a 3-team, 6-point teaser +140. They separately offer a 3-team, 10-point "Super" teaser at −120 and a 4-team, 13-point "Monster" teaser at −140, both with ties losing.

Pushes matter more than in a straight bet. Under DraftKings' rules, a 3-team teaser with one pushed leg and no losers drops to a 2-team teaser; a 2-team teaser with a push is "no action" and refunded. FanDuel's rules do the same for a 2-team teaser and recalculate larger ones without the pushed leg. Some specialty teasers (DraftKings' Super and Monster among them) grade a push as a loss. Read the rule before you pick a teased number that ends on a whole point.

The break-even math, leg by leg

A teaser is a parlay of equal-looking legs, so the useful number is the win rate each leg needs. Convert the payout to decimal odds, take its reciprocal to get the probability the whole ticket must hit, then take the n-th root for n legs.

Two teams at −120. Decimal odds = 1 + 100/120 = 1.8333. The ticket must win 1/1.8333 = 54.55% of the time. Each leg must win √0.5455 = 73.9%.

The same arithmetic at other prices you will see on teaser charts:

Teaser	Payout	Decimal	Ticket must win	Each leg must win
2 teams, 6 pts	−110	1.909	52.4%	72.4%
2 teams, 6 pts	−120	1.833	54.5%	73.9%
2 teams, 6 pts	−130	1.769	56.5%	75.2%
2 teams, 6 pts	−135	1.741	57.4%	75.8%
3 teams, 6 pts	+160	2.600	38.5%	72.7%
3 teams, 6 pts	+140	2.400	41.7%	74.7%
4 teams, 6 pts	+250	3.500	28.6%	73.1%
3 teams, 10 pts, ties lose	−120	1.833	54.5%	81.7%
4 teams, 13 pts, ties lose	−140	1.714	58.3%	87.4%

This assumes the legs are independent, which is roughly true for teams in different games and not true for two legs in the same game.

Now the baseline. We teased every side of every game in the nflverse file by 6 points, 1999 through 2025. Setting pushes aside, a randomly chosen 6-point teased side won 69.2% of the time (14,296 legs). That is below every break-even in the table. A teaser built from arbitrary games is a parlay with a worse price.

Why crossing 3 and 7 changes the answer

Six points is not worth the same everywhere. Moving a favourite from −7.5 to −1.5 turns every 2-, 3-, 4-, 5-, 6- and 7-point win into a cover, and those include both of the NFL's most common margins (see NFL key numbers). Moving a favourite from −13 to −7 captures a stretch of margins that happen far less often.

That gives the classic Wong criteria: favourites of 7.5 to 8.5 teased down to 1.5 to 2.5, and underdogs of 1.5 to 2.5 teased up to 7.5 to 8.5. Both windows span 3 and 7.

Here is how those legs did in the same file, pushes excluded:

Leg type	1999–2025	Since 2015
Underdog +1.5 to +2.5, teased to +7.5 to +8.5	75.6% (900 legs)	77.6% (491)
Favourite −7.5 to −8.5, teased to −1.5 to −2.5	73.1% (491 legs)	73.4% (256)
Any side, teased 6 points	69.2% (14,296)	70.0% (5,977)

Two things stand out. The underdog half has cleared the −120 break-even of 73.9%, but only by about 1.7 points, and with 900 legs its sampling error is about 1.4 points either way: a modest edge, not a comfortable one. It has been stronger since 2015 (77.6%). The favourite half has not cleared it; at 73.1% it sits just under, and with fewer than 500 legs its sampling error is about two percentage points either way, so the honest reading is "roughly break-even at −120". Refinements that bettors layer on top (low totals, home or road, avoiding teams whose lines have moved) were not tested here, and we are not claiming any of them hold up.

The spread in the file is the one the dataset records for each game; it is not necessarily the price you could have got, and a line that moved from 2.5 to 3 before kickoff would have left the window. A backtest on historical lines describes the past. It does not promise the same rate this season.

Why books reprice teasers

Once the market understood which legs carried the value, books had three levers, and all three are in the rules above.

The payout. A 2-team 6-point teaser at −110 needs 72.4% per leg. At −130 it needs 75.2%, above the favourite legs and within half a point of the underdog legs' full-period 75.6%. Every ten cents of teaser juice adds roughly 1.3 to 1.5 points to the per-leg hurdle.

The points. Offering 6.5 or 7 points at a worse payout sounds generous, but on a Wong leg the first 6 points already cross 3 and 7. The extra half point or point buys margins of 8 and 9, which land far less often (3.7% of games end by 8 in the same file), so check the lower payout against that before assuming more points means more value.

The structure. "Ties lose" turns the refund on a whole-number teased line into a loss, and teasers with 10 or 13 points spread the move across numbers that do not matter. The per-leg break-evens of 81.7% and 87.4% show what those products actually ask for.

Books can also restrict which lines may be teased, or limit accounts, as business decisions. Those do not appear in the house rules and vary by operator.

Should you bet them?

If a book offers a 2-team, 6-point teaser at −120 or better and the lines you are teasing genuinely sit in the Wong windows, the historical record says the underdog legs have been the stronger half, modestly above break-even, and the favourite legs roughly break-even. At −130 and worse, which includes the −135 on DraftKings' filed chart, the history leaves essentially no margin. Compare the teaser to the alternative, which is often simply betting the underdog straight or buying onto +3; the parlays guide and the Academy's implied probability guide walk through converting each option to a probability you can compare.

A teaser is still a parlay. Even two legs that each win 75% of the time both lose about one time in sixteen, and at least one of them loses, sinking the ticket, more than four times in ten. Size them like the volatile bets they are.

Sports betting is legal only in some states and only for adults 21 and over in most. Historical win rates describe the past, not future games.