A Pleaser is a wager involving two or more outcomes in a single wager wherein you adjust the point spread in the house’s favor in return for increased odds, meaning increased payouts. BetUS has point spread-only pleasers for NFL and NCAA football and NBA and NCAA basketball. Totals are not allowed in pleasers.

For football, pleasers may contain tow to eight-point spread picks.

For basketball, only two-team point spread pleasers are allowed.

Pleaser Betting Odds

Pleaser odds can vary quite dramatically based on the following two factors though.

• Number of points the spread is moved by.
• Number of selections included in wager.

The odds will increase as the number of points the spread moves by is increased. This is only logical, as a bigger move makes it harder to get the selection right. So a seven-point pleaser would have higher odds than a six-point pleaser, while a four-point pleaser would have lower odds.

Likewise, the odds increase as the number of selections included in the wager is increased. This is also logical, as with more selections there is a greater chance of getting at least one wrong. A three-team pleaser therefore has higher odds than a two-team pleaser. A four-team pleaser has higher odds again, and so on.

It’s important to consider the odds when placing a pleaser, as they’ll help you to work out how often a wager needs to win to be profitable. With a two-team six-point pleaser at 6/1, for example, winning once every seven attempts is required to average break even. This is 14.29% of the time, so you need to win more often than that to be profitable.

In order to determine the odds given for each team individually, you need to do the following calculations.

• Change the break-even percentage to its decimal format
• In this case (14.29%), that’s 0.1429
• Calculate the square root of this number
• This solver to 0.3780
• Chance this number back to a percentage
• This give us 37.80%

This tells us that if each selection individually wins 37.80% of the time, we’ll go 2-0 on our selections 14.29% of the time. We’d therefore want to be confident that each selection has a better than 37.80% chance of winning if we’re going to be profitable.

The numbers here indicate that pleasers are not only hard to get right, they also don’t offer a lot of value. This is largely why so many experts recommend avoiding them completely. They are viewed by many as –EV bets that are meant to tempt recreational bettors seeking large payouts.

However, +EV please bets do exist on rare occasions. This is something you probably wouldn’t discover reading betting strategy in books, forums, or blog posts, because of the general consensus that all pleasers are -EV sucker bets that are heavily sold.