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Sportsbooks have been making loads of money on SGPs (same game parlay) for years now. They are a large part of the sportsbooks business model and sports bettors understand that they come with more vig than your average parlay and largely accept that.
That's the accepted trade: convenience and correlation come at a price. What's less understood is how large that price has gotten, so we ran the numbers on a simple example.
A 2 leg SGP price has three components: the price of leg 1, the price of leg 2, and the correlation between them. The book charges its normal vig on each leg, then adjusts for correlation. Some additional margin for correlation uncertainty is reasonable. The question is how much.
Let's use opposing quarterback passing yards from opening night, the Super Bowl rematch: Sam Darnold and Drake Maye, each priced at -110 on their totals. Any pairing works, but this one is clean. We'll use the industry leaders.
Two -110 legs parlayed with zero correlation pay +264. The Darnold over / Maye over SGP is +220 on DraftKings and +211 on FanDuel, and the double under prices are the same. That makes sense: the books believe these overs are positively correlated, so the payout comes down.
Here's where it gets interesting. If the overs are positively correlated, then one over paired with one under should be negatively correlated, and priced above the +264 uncorrelated baseline, somewhere around +325 if the correlation is symmetric. Allowing for some pricing caution, +290 to +300 would be understandable. Instead, DraftKings prices it at +240 and FanDuel at +237. Both books are pricing the negatively correlated combination as if it were still positively correlated.
The cleanest way to see the total cost: these four outcomes (over/over, over/under, under/over, under/under) are mutually exclusive and exhaustive, so their true probabilities must sum to 100%. Sum the implied probabilities from DraftKings' prices and you get roughly 121%. FanDuel comes out around 124%. For reference, a single -110/-110 market holds about 4.8%, and even a standard vigged parlay of two such markets implies around 110%. The SGP matrix (for a pretty benign 2 leg is holding roughly double the vig of a normal parlay. If you want to put it into probabilities, if Sam Darnold goes over his passing yards and you want to bet Drake Mayes over passing yards you can get them around 60%, and if you want to SGP Sam Darnold over his passing yards with Drake Maye under his passing yards you can get those around 56%.
To be fair, this is one game and one market on early lines, and SGP pricing is genuinely harder than straight markets. But the sportsbooks are very capable of pricing a simple correlation such as passing yards between quarterbacks and doubling the vig because the quarterbacks happen to play in the same game is not right. This is my appeal to the books to take a look at their SGP prices and show a bit more confidence in themselves making them more customer friendly in a world where bettors have more options than ever. Please make sure you pay attention to what you are betting before you do so. Screenshots below:
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