1. What is a Round Robin Calculator?
A round robin calculator is a betting tool used to rapidly calculate the costs and potential profit of a round robin bet. Using this calculator can help bettors to plan, select and adjust their round robin bets to maximize chances of success.
Also known as: Round robin parlay calculator, round robin odds calculator, round robin payout calculator.
2. What is a Round Robin Bet?
A round robin bet is a bet type that involves grouping together several bet selections, like you would a parlay. However, instead of placing one bet on this group of selections, with a round robin, you would break it down into multiple smaller parlays and bet on those.
For example: Let's say you want to bet on four particular NFL teams to win their games one weekend. Below you can see what a standard parlay could look like, including the New England Patriots, Chicago Bears, Newcastle Jets and Kansas City Chiefs to win.
With this parlay, if just one team loses, your entire bet will lose and you will come away with nothing. However, if you instead choose to place a round robin bet, this parlay would be broken into 6 smaller parlays*.
That way, even if any one team loses, you're still in with a chance of coming away with overall profits (see below).
This bet type gets its name from a tournament type of the same name - a round robin tournament - where every team plays every other team in its group at least once.
*The above example assumes a parlay size of 2 (see next section for what this means).
3. Round Robin Calculator Inputs & Outputs
Before we get into the details of how to use a round robin bet calculator (section 4), it can be useful to first understand what each input and output on the calculator means.
Round Robin Calculator Inputs
- Stake: This is the stake you wish to place on each parlay in your round robin.
- Number of Games: This is the number of games you wish to include in your bet. If your round robin included four different teams, you would enter 4.
- Parlay Size: This is the number of selections that would be included within each of your round robin's smaller parlays. The higher this number, the higher the risk and the higher the potential payout (the most common parlay size is 2).
- Include Smaller Parlays: This can be toggled to yes or no and is only applicable for parlay sizes over 2. If ‘yes’ it will include all possible parlay combinations below your parlay size. This will increase your overall stake, risk and potential winnings.
- Stake Type: This refers to whether you want the stake you entered to be the total stake you wish to bet across all bets (‘Total Combined Stake’), or whether it's the figure you wish to place on each bet in the round robin parlay ('Stake Per Bet').
- Game Odds: This is the sportsbook odds attached to each individual bet in your round robin (the default uses American odds, but you can toggle this to decimal odds at the top). The higher the ‘Number of Games’ the more odds rows will be added.
Round Robin Calculator Outputs
- Total Outlay: This is simply the total stake of your bets.
- Total Payout: This is the maximum win payout you could earn from your round robin provided all bets win.
- Simulated Result: Also known as the situational result, this is the potential profit from your bet, provided all bets win (total payout minus total outlay).
4. How to Use a Round Robin Calculator: Step-by-Step Example
Once you understand what the inputs/outputs refer to, using the round robin calculator is simple (the round robin's algorithm does the hard work).
Here are the seven steps to using a round robin calculator, using a worked example:
- Choose Selections: Pick a group of bet selections you wish to place a round robin bet on. This could be four teams you fancy to win. We'll use the same example as earlier: the New England Patriots, Chicago Bears, New York Jets and Kansas City Chiefs to win.
- Enter the Number of Games: In this case our bet involves four NFL games, so we'll enter 4.
- Enter Your Parlay Size: As mentioned, this refers to the number of combinations in each of your parlays within your round robin. For this example we're going to go for the most popular and least risky choice, 2.
- Toggle ‘Include Smaller Parlays’ and ‘Stake Type’: On the ‘Include Smaller Parlays’ toggle, we're going stay with ‘No’ and the stake type we're going to use is ‘Stake Per Bet’.
- Enter The Odds For Each Game: Now it's time to enter each game's odds. For the sake of this example, we're going to say all of our are expected to win their games, each having moneyline odds of -110.
- View the Outputs: Looking at our outputs that have been automatically calculated, we can see the overall outlay we'd place on this round robin would be $60, the total potential payout would be $218.68 and the simulated result (total potential profit) would be $158.68.
- Place Your Bet: Now it's time do decide whether or not you want to place the bet. If you're happy with the simulated result, you can go ahead and log into your sportsbook and place your round robin bet.
5. When Should You Choose a Round Robin Over a Standard Parlay?
You may choose a round robin bet over a standard parlay when you want to hedge your bets or spread risk across multiple combinations of events.
Why? Because selecting multiple teams and creating various parlay combinations from those teams allows you to cover more outcomes than a single parlay, increasing your chances of winning at least one and reducing your chances of losing overall.
However, choosing a round robin comes at the cost of lower potential payouts compared to a standard parlay (where all selections must win for the bet to pay out).
As a result, round robins are useful when you're uncertain about the outcome of individual matches or want to minimize losses if one or two selections fail. But, if you're particularly confident that all of your selections will win, a standard parlay may be the preferable option.
Tip: If you are looking to place a standard parlay, check out the parlay calculator to test the best combinations.
6. What are the Benefits of Round Robin Betting?
A range of benefits are associated with round robin betting and with using a round robin parlay calculator to assist with the process. Five of the most common include:
- Spreads Risk: A round robin bet works by spreading bets across different selections, reducing the impact of unexpected outcomes, and helping to minimize potential losses.
- Increases Chances of Winning: By covering multiple outcomes, round robin betting increases your chances of winning compared to placing all bets on a single parlay outcome.
- Reduces Time: Automated calculations save the significant time and risk attached to calculating all parlays manually, enabling bettors to focus more on strategy and analysis.
- Flexible Calculation: Round robin calculators allow for easy adjustment of bet combinations, accommodating various stakes and odds configurations efficiently.
- Bankroll Management: By accurately computing potential payouts and risks, these calculators help users optimize their bankroll allocation and minimize losses.
7. Are There Any Limitations to Round Robin Bets?
Though round robins can be an intelligent choice in certain sports betting situations, they're not bulletproof. Here are five important limitations of round robin bets to be aware of:
- Increased Complexity: Even though a calculator can reduce this, robin betting introduces complexity in managing multiple bets, requiring careful attention to allocations and potential outcomes.
- Higher Costs: Betting on multiple selections using a round robin parlay calculator can lead to increased betting costs due to the multiplication of bets.
- Reduced Potential Returns: Despite covering multiple outcomes, round robin betting may limit potential returns compared to focusing bets on a single outcome.
- Still Carries Risk: Though it can reduce risk when compared to standard parlay bets, round robin betting still involves inherent uncertainty and potential losses Bettors should remain mindful of the risks involved and exercise caution in their betting decisions.
- Not Always the Optimal Option: While round robin betting offers diversification, it's not always the optimal choice. Depending on circumstances, such as odds and desired payouts, other betting options may be more suitable.
8. 5 Better Alternatives to Round Robin Betting
While using round robins can be a useful option to mitigate the total risk attached to standard parlays, they're by no means risk-free.
Actually, there are far more effective alternative betting strategies for minimizing risk and maximizing profits that many Americans aren't as aware of. Below, we've ranked the five best.
1) Matched Betting
Matched betting stands out as perhaps the most effective risk-free method for generating significant monthly profits. This tactic involves placing bets on every possible outcome of a sporting event to unlock a sportsbook promotion without any risk, before repeating the process using the promo to into guaranteed profits.
Betting tools such as an odds matcher (A.K.A Dutch matcher), matched betting calculator (A.K.A dutch calculator) and free bet converter (A.K.A free bet conversion calculator) make this process simple.
2) Arbitrage Betting
Arbitrage betting is similar to matched betting in that it involves betting on all outcomes of an event to eliminate risk. But unlike matched betting, arbing doesn't involve unlocking free bets. Instead, it aims to profit from disparities in odds across different sportsbooks, which can be compared using tools like an arb calculator.
While arbitrage betting can be effective in minimizing risk, it doesn't offer the same potential for maximizing guaranteed profits in the short term as matched betting does.
3) Expected Value Betting
Like round robin betting, one of the key purposes of expected value (EV) betting is to reduce risk. However, EV betting is more centred around long-term risk reduction.
The idea is to back statistically profitable bets (+EV bets), with the help of an EV calculator, to earn incremental profits that accumulate in the long term. While this is a more stat-backed strategy than round robin betting, it's not entirely risk-free like matched betting.
4) Kelly Criterion Betting
Kelly criterion betting involves adjusting your wager sizes for each bet based on the perceived advantage and available bankroll you have on a case-by-case basis. The key goal of this is to minimize losses on risky bets and maximize wins on sure bets.
While this is a more personalised approach to minimizing risk that round robin betting, it can be equally as complex when carried out in the long term (though this can be helped with the use of a kelly calculator).
5) Poisson Betting
If you haven't heard of poisson betting, don't worry. It's a more niche style of betting than the other options, that focuses more on maximizing the success of prop bets.
Unlike round robin betting, it can take into account historical averages in its calculation to produce a range of different event probabilities. However, its more specific use, time-consuming calculations (which can be reduced using a poisson calculator) and lack of guaranteed returns make this strategy a less appealing option when compared to strategies like matched betting.
9. Free Trial: Get Started with Risk-Free Betting
If you're tired of spending forever trying to find the best round robin bets, just to come away with little more (or even less!) money than when you started, consider risk-free matched betting.
Matched betting process (simplified)
Involving strategically converting sportsbook promotions (such as free bets) into guaranteed profits, matched betting is a tried and tested method of earning risk-free winnings every time. And with a raft of global publications including The Guardian and Vice having their say on this popular side hustle, over the last decade its popularity has skyrocketed.
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