Grand Salami Sports Betting Strategy

One of the lesser-known, lesser-used bets is the grand salami. While it sounds like something you'd rather be ordering at a deli, ordering it up in the sportsbook could have some value in the right situation.

If you're not overly familiar with the grand salami and the uses for it, let's take a closer look and see what it means and why it might offer bettors some value.

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What Is The Grand Salami?

The grand salami is an all-encompassing over-under that's offered in baseball and hockey. This type of total combines all of the over-unders of all of the games on the board. In other words, if you're betting the grand salami in hockey, you're predicting whether the all of the goals in all of the games on a given night will go over or under the grand salami total. Let's take a look at the following example:

Game 1
Toronto Maple Leafs at Ottawa Senators, Total: 6

Game 2
St. Louis Blues at Dallas Stars, Total: 6.5

Game 3
Tampa Bay Lightning at Calgary Flames, Total: 5.5

Grand Salami: 18

As you can see, the combined total of the three games is 18, and that's what the grand salami is. Then your job is to decide whether it will go over or under the number.

The Strategy Of Betting The Grand Salami

The key to betting the grand salami comes down to making your own projections. Of course, you could simply bet on each over-under individually. That's fair. However, what we're doing here is trying to find a bigger overall edge.

Let's say you're an advanced sports bettor and are crunching your own numbers. Your projections show that because the Maple Leafs are using a backup goaltender, the total 6.5 seems like a good play. And for the Blues-Stars game, your projections estimate about 6.25 goals in that contest. Of course, you can bet those individually, but by playing over on the grand salami, you are somewhat combining those edges.

There are several factors to consider here, such as which teams are in back-to-backs or rest in general, which teams are with their regular goaltenders versus who are rolling with backups, and general matchups.

As for baseball, remember that the grand salami is offered in that sport too. What you'll want to look at in baseball is who is pitching in the games, what their splits are (home versus away), how they square off versus their upcoming opponents, and so on. If you're handicapping the games for the day and are planning to bet the over on the majority of them, sprinkling a little bit of money on the grand salami also makes sense. It means you're expecting a high scoring day overall based on your handicapping, and betting the over on the grand salami is another way to take advantage of that.

Postponed Games Lead to No Action

One important factor to keep in mind with the grand salami is that if any games are postponed or canceled on the day, your entire bet becomes a push. For example, if you bet the under in a grand salami for baseball and one of the games gets rained out, the bet pushes, and all stakes are refunded.

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Dave Golokhov is a featured writer at BettingPros. For more from Dave, check out his archive and follow him @davegolokhov.