Teaser Calculator: Payout and the Break-Even Rate Per Leg

What a teaser trades

A teaser moves the line on every leg in your favour by an agreed number of points, then prices the whole ticket as a single bet at reduced odds. Six points on an NFL spread is a real improvement, and the book charges for it twice: once in the price, and once by requiring every leg to land.

The payout side is straightforward. A two-team six-point teaser posted at −120 returns $183.33 on $100, which is $83.33 of profit. That is less than a straight bet on either side would pay, and the difference is what the six points cost.

The interesting number is on the other side. The break-even rate of −120 is 54.55%, so the ticket has to win that often to come out level. But a ticket only wins when every leg wins, so the rate each leg has to clear is the nth root of 54.55%, which for two legs is 73.85%. That is the figure worth carrying, and no slip prints it.

Why the per-leg number is the one that matters

A plain NFL spread at −110 needs 52.38% to break even. A teased leg in a two-team ticket at −120 needs 73.85%. The six points have to be worth more than twenty-one percentage points of win probability, per leg, for the trade to make sense.

On most NFL spreads six points is not worth that. On a few it might be, and that is the entire basis of the strategy people call the Wong teaser: a six-point move that crosses both 3 and 7, the two margins NFL games land on most often. Moving through both key numbers gains more probability than moving through six arbitrary ones, because the distribution of football scores is lumpy rather than smooth.

Whether that edge survives is genuinely disputed.

It was published decades ago, books have adjusted teaser pricing since, and the argument now turns on how much of the original gap remains. This calculator deliberately does not take a side. It gives the rate the leg has to clear; what a particular teased line is actually worth is a modelling question, and putting a fabricated number behind it would be worse than leaving the gap where you can see it.

Legs, points and prices

Adding legs raises the payout and the per-leg requirement at the same time. Not at the same speed, though.

The per-leg rate is a root, so it climbs slowly, and a three-team teaser at a typical price needs a lower rate per leg than a two-team one. That sounds backwards until you remember the price moves too. What does not change is that every added leg is another way to lose the whole ticket.

Points work the same way in reverse. Ten-point teasers exist and they are priced accordingly, so the per-leg rate they demand is higher despite the line being far better. The points field above is recorded on the output rather than used in the arithmetic, because translating points into probability is exactly the modelling step this page will not fake.

Prices differ between books on teasers more than on almost anything else. Two books offering the same six-point two-team teaser at −110 and −130 are charging noticeably different amounts for the same product, and the per-leg requirement moves with it. Running both through the calculator takes seconds and is the one comparison worth making before placing a teaser at all.

Basketball teasers follow the same arithmetic with different numbers. Points are worth less in a sport with no key numbers and much higher scoring, and the standard teaser sizes are larger to compensate. Everything on this page applies unchanged, which is one of the few advantages of a tool that refuses to model the sport.

It is worth comparing a teaser against the alternative it replaces, not against nothing. Two teased legs at a typical price need 73.85% each. The same two games bet straight need 52.38% each, and they settle separately, so one loss does not take the other with it. The teaser buys better lines and sells back both the price and the independence.

That comparison also shows why teasers look more attractive than they are. Six points is a vivid, concrete improvement you can see on the screen. The worse price and the all-or-nothing settlement are abstract and arrive later. Converting all three into one figure, the rate a leg has to clear, is the only way to weigh them against each other.