Wild Card Weekend Teaser: The Wong Way (Archive)

NFL Pick: Three-Legged 6-Point Teaser (+150) at Bovada (visit our Bovada Review)

Teasers are some of the more exotic bets on the NFL odds board, but this one’s the right play for Wild Card Weekend.

You may have noticed we don’t do a lot of “exotic” betting here at the home office. Single bets (spreads, moneylines and totals) have been our bread and our butter for years now; more recently, parlays and especially prop bets have gotten into the mix.

So how about a Wild Card teaser for this week’s NFL picks? Parlays are already a bit tricky, and you usually have to pay a hefty premium when you tease those football lines. But there’s a special kind of parlay you may have heard of, and there are three teams we can plug in this weekend to make it work.

What Is a Wong Teaser?

I see you’re already ahead of us. The Wong Teaser, named after semi-legendary gambling author Stanford Wong (aka John Ferguson), is a 6-point teaser where you get your chosen teams to cross the magic numbers 3 and 7 with your line moves. This means we’re looking for the following candidates:

Favorites (-7.5, -8, -8.5)
Underdogs (+1.5, +2, +2.5)

Sure enough, we have three teams at press time that we can use for a Wong teaser this Wild Card Weekend:

Delicious. By applying a 6-point teaser to this 3-team combo, we end up with Jaguars +8, Bengals -2 and Buccaneers +8.5, jumping over the two biggest magic numbers in football: three and seven. And a standard 6-point, 3-team teaser (each team at -110 vigorish) pays out at +150. Easy money.

How Is This Legal?

Actually, Wong teasers have caused the sportsbooks so much damage over the years that it’s harder to get the right NFL lines to put in your combo bet. We’re very fortunate to have three games this week that fit the bill – partly because the Bengals have moved from -7 since the NFL lines first hit the board. It usually takes a full 16-game slate to produce three Wongable matchups.

Some books also now grade teasers so that a push counts as a loss, rather than reducing your combo by one. And those 3-team teasers used to pay out at +180 instead of +150. Check your book’s rules and payout list to see what they have on offer, and do yourself a favor by signing up at multiple books so you can get the best prices.

Simple Math

Otherwise, these Wong teasers boil down to simple math. Roughly one NFL game in six will end with a winning margin of three points; another 10% or so will end with a team winning by seven. By crossing both magic numbers, according to Wizard of Odds, you’re going to win your average Wong teaser about 40% of the time.

That’s the equivalent of +150, so unless you’re with a book that’s still paying out more, you want better than an average Wong teaser before you start flinging your money around. And our proposed 3-teamer does seem to have what it takes. FiveThirtyEight projects the following kayfabe spreads for Wild Card Weekend:

Jaguars +2.5
Bengals -9.5
Buccaneers +3

Two out of three ain’t bad. The Bengals might even get to face third-string QB Anthony Brown this Sunday, which is why their odds have been getting shorter recently. And you know how poorly Dallas plays in January. They’re 10-20 SU and 8-22 ATS since 1996, and they’re 3-10 SU and 2-11 ATS since 2015.

Does It Have to Be Six Points?

Not at all. Wong teasers can also be made using 6.5 or seven points for your combo bet, and you can combine anywhere between two and 10 teams. Do you really like the San Francisco 49ers as 9.5-point home faves for Saturday’s Wild Card game against the Seattle Seahawks? Put the Niners in a 7-point Wong teaser and knock them down to -2.5.

Here’s another nugget of Wong wisdom for you: These January playoff games naturally have lower totals on average than regular-season games, partly because of the weather, and partly because of the stronger defenses on display. Sunday night’s Ravens-Bengals game has a total of 40.5 points; dragging Cincinnati back down from -8 to -2 means more here than it would have earlier in the year with a total in the mid-40s.

Anyway, there you have it: A three-team Wong teaser for Wild Card Weekend. Shop smart, bet accordingly, and may the prolate spheroid be with you on the road to Super Bowl LVII.

Teaser Picks

Jaguars: +2.5 to +8.5
Bengals: -8 to -2
Buccaneers: +2.5 to +8.5

NFL Pick: Three-Legged 6-Point Teaser (+150) at Bovada

*The line and/or odds on picks in this article might have moved since the content was commissioned. For updated line movements, visit BMR’s free betting odds product.