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Pleasers, or reverse teasers, are the exact opposite of teaser bets. Teasers allow bettors to alter the spread and totals lines in their favor at the expense of a reduced payout. With peasers, the line moves in favor of the sportsbook and the bettor is offered a larger potential payout.
Just like with parlays and teasers, all legs must be correct to win a pleaser/reverse teaser. Obviously, pleasers are more difficult to hit than parlays (and especially teasers) since the lines are moved against the bettor. The silver lining is the potentially massive payouts, which exceed those of a standard parlay bet.
Let’s say your sportsbook released the opening lines for a fictitious Super Bowl game and has the Eagles at +3.5 and the Chiefs at -3.5. If you apply a six-point pleaser, the adjusted lines will look like this:
- Eagles -3.5 (from +3.5)
- Chiefs -9.5 (from -3.5)
Now, instead of the Eagles having to win or lose by less than 4 points, they must win by 4 points in order for your bet to win. The Chiefs, on the other hand, now have to win by 10 instead of 4.
You can find all the basics of pleasers betting here, including how these bets work and how to place them in online sportsbooks.
Is Pleaser/Reverse Teaser a Good Bet?
Pleasers are hands down one of the hardest types of sports bets to win, which is why many experts advise against betting them. Winning a parlay is hard enough, let alone shifting the lines against you and giving sportsbooks an additional edge.
NFL pleasers that go through two or more key numbers (3, 6, 7, 10) are especially hard to hit because you’re walking away from the most common margins of victory. In these cases, especially, it’s very hard to justify including them in your pleaser/reverse teaser.
One of the few instances where pleasers would make some sense is when you’re predicting that a +6 underdog could pull off the upset or a blowout win for the favorite side. Again, this doesn’t often happen, particularly in low-variance sports like the NFL.
Pleasers should not be your main betting strategy and it’s typically in your best interest to bet them rarely, if at all.
Pleaser Odds & Payouts
Understanding the concept of a pleaser bet and the associated payouts can be a little tricky. It can help to look at an actual example, so let’s take a look at a 2-team pleaser wager at FanDuel Sportsbook:
Here, we used a standard 6-point pleaser. Instead of the Jaguars being +3.5 underdogs, they are now -2.5 favorites. Likewise, the Buccaneers were favorites at -4.5, and they’re even heavier favorites at -10.5. If we were to hit this $100 pleaser, we’d win $700.
So, was the juice worth the squeeze? Not quite.
The return on investment, calculated by taking the net winnings and dividing them by the total risk, stands at 14.29% for this wager. In other words, we’ll break even if we win our bet 14.29% of the time. Consequently, we need to win 37.8% of our individual legs to reach the breakeven point.
While this may not seem like much, it’s actually very difficult to do considering the lines, especially in the NFL, are so accurate.
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How Can I Place a Pleaser Bet?
As complex as they seem, placing a pleaser bet is a walk in the park. Once you make your picks, just select the “teaser” option to adjust the lines automatically. The default value is at +6 (standard teaser bet), so you’ll need to switch it to -6 or whatever negative number that seems fit.
In case the sportsbook doesn’t have this option, you’ll have to choose alternate lines for each game and construct your pleasers manually. You can learn more about alternate spreads here and alternate totals here.
There are sometimes pleasers/reverse teasers on parlay cards that are offered from some physical sportsbooks. For example, the Delaware Parlay Cards have a reverse teaser card for the NFL that pays out 20/1 for 3-team pleasers, 60/1 for 4-team, 200/1 for 5-team, and so on.
