This paper concerns an effective text-dependent speaker verification method to increase the performance of speaker verification. While various speaker verification methods have already been developed, their effectiveness has not yet been formally proven in terms of achieving acceptable performance levels. This paper proposes a weighted likelihood procedure along with a confidence measure based on subword-based text-dependent speaker verification. Our aim is to remedy the low performance problem in speaker verification by exploring a means to strengthen the verification likelihood via subword-based hypothesis criteria and weighted likelihood method. Experimental results show that the proposed speaker verification method outperforms that of the speaker verification scheme without using the proposed decision by a factor of up to 1.6 times. From these results, the proposed speaker verification method is shown to be very effective and to achieve a reliable performance.