An exciting final week of Major League Baseball’s regular season is going to lead to an even more exciting postseason.
Current odds to win the World Series from William Hill show a crowded field of legit contenders capable of stringing together victories in advance of a parade.
Here’s a look at the latest numbers. We’ve included the percentage “win equivalent”:
Odds to win World Series
| Team | Odds | Win Eq. |
| Red Sox | 7/2 | 22% |
| Astros | 4/1 | 20% |
| Dodgers | 11/2 | 18% |
| Cubs | 15/2 | 12% |
| Yankees | 8/1 | 11% |
| Indians | 17/2 | 11% |
| Braves | 17/2 | 11% |
| A’s | 12/1 | 8% |
| Brewers | 12/1 | 8% |
| Cardinals | 15/1 | 6% |
| Rockies | 22/1 | 4% |
While there’s a 100 percent chance somebody will win the World Series this season, the win equivalents add up to 131 percent. A bit of that is rounding. But, it’s mostly because sports books build universes much larger than 100 percent to create a house edge.
Sports books love having so many legit contenders. Gamblers will place bets all over the board. Losing bets will more than pay off the eventual winning bets, leaving a nice profit for the establishment.
A great postseason is virtually certain. Are there any great futures bets left?
Honestly, there are not. Maybe one of the long shots will ultimately run the table and “seem” like a steal at today’s price. But, none of those prices reflect “true” odds. Remember that one of the NL teams listed won’t even reach the postseason (not enough chairs when the music stops). Two more teams listed will be eliminated immediately in wild-card knockouts.
The longer you control your investment plan, the smarter you are at each step along the way. That wouldn’t matter if you were seeing great futures prices. If the Yankees were 40/1 today, don’t worry about nuance … that’s a great bet because they’d win the title more than once in 41 theoretical run-throughs. But they probably wouldn’t win it more than one out of nine tries in this fantastic field, and that’s the current price.
As we’ve explained before … your best investment strategy for any team is to ride them round by round. Whatever you were going to bet on the futures board, put all of it on that team’s first challenge (wild-card game or series). If your team wins, take your return (initial stake and winnings), and put all of that on your team in the next round. If they win again, keep going all the way until corks are popped.
The advantages of a rolling postseason parlay are greater returns than futures prices offer, flexibility to “bail” if there’s a key injury, and the option to lock in profit.
If a key player suffers a season-ending injury late in a series victory, you can jump off the horse with your winnings. If you find out a likely World Series opponent from the other league is much better than you realized, you can “call off the jam” (in old-school roller derby terms) and pocket a profit.
If your team loses? Well, that futures bet would have gone down anyway. A rolling parlay lets you use the same money more intelligently.
