Waterhouse VC: Play Your Hand

Every month, industry investors Waterhouse VC publish an article that spotlights different aspects of the ecosystem. This month, Tom Waterhouse delves into the rise of same game parlays.

No one rushes to the pub to talk about their fixed-income fund returning 5%. But buying Bitcoin at $300? That’s a story that gets retold. Same Game Parlays (SGPs) work on the same principle in sports betting: small bets with big payout potential that bettors chase and share with their friends.

An SGP, also called a Same Game Multi or Bet Builder, lets bettors combine multiple outcomes within a single match. Instead of just betting on Barcelona to win, a punter can add: over 8 corners, a specific player to score, and both teams to get a card - all in one bet with compounding odds. The format turns every bet into a potential payday story.

The appeal is obvious. Recreational bettors aren't always satisfied with a $20 profit on a straight match bet. They want the $10-into-$500 story. SGPs deliver that lottery-style format.

For operators, SGPs solve a critical problem. Rising costs - licenses, taxes, compliance, data fees - squeeze margins on traditional betting. Head-to-head bets return 4-6% on turnover; SGPs consistently deliver high-teen margins, often exceeding 20%.

This margin expansion isn't luck. Because SGP outcomes are correlated (if Barcelona wins, they're more likely to have had shots on target), pricing becomes complex. Punters can't benchmark value across operators, and the house edge compounds with each added leg. The huge appeal to bettors and structural margin advantage have made SGPs the most important product innovation in modern sports betting.

The Margin Multiplier

In the U.S., parlays have grown to more than a quarter of total handle and more than half of revenue. For Flutter, SGPs accounted for 19.2% of stakes in 2019, rising to 24.3% in 2023, with margins on these bets increasing from 13.1% to 18.5% as bettors added more legs. In 2023, 262 million SGPs were placed across its brands, up 75% year-over-year (Source: Flutter).

Entain reports that in Spain, about 20% of football bets are now bet builders, while in Brazil the figure approaches 40%. Overall bet builder stakes more than doubled in 2024 and their share doubled again in the first half of 2025. DraftKings’ path to profitability has been driven largely by mix-shift towards parlays and SGPs.

Illustrative margin impact on $1 billion handle (assuming 5% single hold, 25% SGP hold)

How We Got Here

Given their impact, it is striking how recent SGP growth has been. When bookmakers first transitioned online in the 2000s, priorities centred on replicating retail. It was functional and familiar, with no major incentive to build differently.

The 2010s shifted focus to mobile and in-play. Apps, streaming, cash out and fast data feeds absorbed investment, while regulators pressed compliance hurdles and costs onto operators.

In-play looked like the natural growth engine. It delivered higher hold than straight pre-match 1X2, and made it harder for customers to benchmark fair prices in real time, producing margins in the 8-12% range. Retail shop windows had long advertised high-margin combinations like “Team A to win to nil and Player X to score”, prefiguring the modern SGP, but there was no infrastructure to price correlated legs dynamically.

Request A Bet

The first signal of changing preferences came from Twitter (now X). Sky Bet noticed customers asking for prices on markets that didn’t exist, turned the feed into ‘Request A Bet’, and put traders on it full-time, with other competitors soon following suit. Manually pricing thousands of requests was not scalable, so operators pre-packaged popular combos, but the demand was for self-service.

Coxy85’s question reached John Maguire at Sportsbet, then Paddy Power’s emerging Australian brand. Maguire’s team used correlation models developed by Paddy Power and launched SGPs for the 2016 AFL Grand Final. A $50,000 win from two $20 bets showed the pull of long-odds, small-stake builders. Flutter rolled the product across Europe, and what began as manual Twitter quotes became a systematised, high-margin core product.

Engineering Problem

The complexity of what Flutter and a few other operators and suppliers have built is easy to underestimate - and that complexity is the moat. When FanDuel launched SGP in the U.S. in 2019, the core engine had been hardened in European football. By month five, SGPs were 5% of online sports betting wagered. DraftKings took two years to release their own version.

Today, the majority of SGP legs are player props. A typical ticket is no longer 'player to score, team to win and over 2.5 goals'. It is: ‘team to win, over 2.5 goals, striker to score, defender 2+ fouls, winger 3+ shots, midfielder to be carded and 10+ corners’. Every leg pulls on the others. If the winger shoots more, the striker is more likely to score, the team is more likely to win and the game is more likely to go over.

To handle that, you need a single model that sees the whole match. Historical data has to be ingested and refreshed. Live feeds have to be mapped in real time. On top sits a projection layer that simulates how the game will play out and produces prices for every market. The SGP layer then takes the customer's selections and asks that engine for the combined probability, instantly, every time a leg is added or removed.

Product Market Fit

SGPs succeed because every event becomes an opportunity to express a view. Few understand implied probabilities, but they hold opinions about the players and their attributes, and those opinions - not mathematical expectation - drive behaviour. When it comes to Ashes cricket, they talk about Root and Labuschagne’s recent form, Bazball aggression, and Lyon on a deteriorating pitch.

As legs tick off, there is the same satisfaction as working through a checklist. When one leg loses, it feels like a near miss rather than a clean loss which is a powerful retention mechanic. DraftKings have even introduced a GhostLeg feature that still pays out if one leg loses.

On a seven-leg builder at 18.0, benchmarking value is tough. The true price might be 30.0, but few will rebuild across operators to check. The margin builds as small pricing errors compound and customers pay a convenience premium for doing everything in one app.

For most recreational bettors, correctly “calling the game” is more satisfying than being validated on price. FanDuel reports that around 90 percent of its SGP tickets are 30 dollars or less, with roughly 60 percent at 5 dollars or less (Source: WSJ). This small-stake structure is suited to restrictive markets like the UK, where financial vulnerability concerns have constrained high-limit bookmaking. In Australia, where there is no online casino, or in-play online, operators need high-margin formats to avoid margin compression.

The Risks for Operators

The format's popularity creates new risks operators are still learning to manage. Most SGP action is recreational - punters aren't thinking about correlation pricing. That makes them interesting for sharps, who can disguise themselves in the flow. Books are happier to take SGP action than straight bets, and thinking laterally can surface angles.

AK Bets highlighted one example: goalkeeper cards in specific game states. If a heavy favourite was trailing late, the opposing goalkeeper was often priced at 200/1 to be booked in the last 10 minutes - prime time-wasting territory. The model priced 200/1 across all game states rather than differentiating for specific situations.

Popularity also creates concentration risk. Gambling influencers regularly post their picks to large followings. Thousands of individuals backing the same 100/1+ combinations could eventually land and expose a small operator to significant liability - particularly when the correlated outcomes all hit at once.

The Opportunity

For Waterhouse VC, SGPs are a case study in how regulation, consumer behaviour and innovation can align. The same forces will shape the next wave of products that let fans go deeper into the sports they care about, while giving operators defensible margins in heavily regulated markets.

Data is the starting point for any modern betting product - from pricing correlation in SGPs to creating entirely new markets and experiences. That is one of the reasons why we believe a business like Racing and Sports is particularly exciting. Those who own the data, can build the best pricing engines, and control the product layer that will set the terms for everyone else.

SGPs are also a product that sportsbooks currently will offer better than any prediction market. Every contract requires full cash backing upfront, limiting the breadth of combinations they can offer compared with a sportsbook’s risk model. In the near term, product depth and differentiation will remain with the books.