$166.94B in, $16.96B kept
A 10.16% hold across all sports betting, up for the fifth consecutive year. That is the blended number, straights and parlays together.
The side quest
Already bet? It is worse than this.
The front page walks through a straight bet at −110, because that is the honest floor. Almost nobody bets the floor. This page is for people who already know what a parlay is and what chasing feels like, and it is the arithmetic on both.
Stacking the fee
The fee does not add. It compounds.
Every leg you add is another 4.55% skimmed off the top, applied to what is left after the last one. Six legs and the book is holding nearly a quarter of your money before a ball is snapped.
You hand over $100
13.03%
Comes back over time $86.97
Never comes back $13.03
The book pays
+596
vs
A fair price pays
+700
Chance it hits
12.5%
Assumes every leg is an even-money game priced at −110, which is the friendliest possible assumption. Correlated legs, alternate lines, and same-game parlays are priced worse than this, not better.
The receipts
This is not a theory. It is what the industry reported.
About 6% held
Close to the −110 floor, because the price is the price and a balanced book cannot do much better than the vig.
19–23% held
Roughly a third of all money wagered, and close to two-thirds of what sportsbooks actually earn. This is the product, and every push notification you get is selling it.
Sources: American Gaming Association CY 2025 Commercial Gaming Revenue Tracker; state regulator bet-type filings for parlay hold.
Chasing
Getting back to even costs more than getting there did.
Chasing is not a personality flaw, it is a math trap. At −110 you have to risk $110 to win back $100, so every round you fail to recover, the hole gets 2.1× deeper, not twice as deep. Here is a $100 bet that did not come in.
| Loss | You are down | To get back to even, risk | Odds of getting here |
|---|
Seven bad flips in a row happens to somebody roughly one session in every 128. By then a $100 mistake has turned into an $8,576 hole, and every dollar of the difference was created by the price rather than by the losing.
The only real brake on this is running out of money in the account. Every product decision a sportsbook makes — stored cards, instant deposits, bonus bets that unlock on a reload — exists to file that brake down.
The point
None of this exists when there is no book.
Parlays compound a fee. Chasing compounds a fee. Take the fee out and both of them turn back into what they looked like when you were fifteen: an argument with your friends about a football game.
There is also nothing to reload. Everybody gets 1,000 credits on Tuesday, the same 1,000, and Tuesday comes whether you had a good week or a terrible one.