Put a £5 treble at 2/1, 6/4 and 3/1 into the bet calculator above and it comes back as £150. It’ll tell you just as quickly what happens when the 3/1 shot gets pulled out an hour before the off. (It becomes a double. You get £37.50.)
It’s a free settler for pretty much anything you’d write on a slip: singles, doubles, trebles, accumulators up to 15 folds, and every full-cover bet from a Trixie to a Goliath. Tick each way and it splits everything into a win part and a place part. Open the extra options and you can add Rule 4 deductions and dead heats for each selection, which is where hand-settling usually goes wrong.
What the bet calculator works out
Pick a bet type, type in the odds and mark each selection as won, placed, lost or void. The total return, profit and the number of winning lines update as you go. Under the results there’s a bet-by-bet breakdown, so on a Yankee you can see which of the eleven bets actually paid.
Odds go in the way you’d see them: 5/2, 2.5, evens or +150 all work. Stake can be per bet or the total you want to spend. Put £22 total on an each way Yankee and the calculator knows that’s 22 bets at £1.
Bet types, quickly
The full-cover bets are just every double, treble and upward combination from your picks, with or without the singles:
- Trixie (3 picks): 3 doubles and a treble. 4 bets.
- Patent (3 picks): a Trixie plus the 3 singles. 7 bets.
- Yankee (4 picks): 11 bets. Lucky 15 is the same four picks with singles, so 15.
- Canadian or Super Yankee (5 picks): 26 bets. Lucky 31 adds the singles.
- Heinz (6 picks): 57 bets, hence the name. Lucky 63 with singles.
- Super Heinz (7 picks): 120 bets. Goliath (8 picks): 247.
Each way doubles all of those. A £1 each way Goliath costs £494, which surprises people at the counter.
Some bet types have their own page with the bet already set up and worked examples: the single double treble calculator (plus separate single, double and treble pages), the Canadian, the Heinz and the Super Heinz.
Non-runners, Rule 4 and dead heats
A void or non-runner is settled at odds of 1.0. In a single you get your stake back. In a multiple it just drops out, so a treble with a non-runner becomes a double and a Yankee with one non-runner settles like a Patent on the other three, with the doubles and the treble counted twice. The calculator handles all of that if you mark the selection void.
Rule 4 kicks in when a horse is withdrawn late and the market hasn’t re-formed. The bookie takes a set number of pence in the pound off your winnings (never your stake). A 20p deduction on a £10 winner at 10/1 turns £100 of winnings into £80, so you collect £90, not £110.
Dead heats split the stake. Two horses tie for first, your £10 at 5/1 is settled as £5 at 5/1, and you get £30 back. Each way bets that dead heat for the last place get the place part halved the same way.
One-winner and all-winner bonuses
Plenty of bookies pay double the odds on the single if only one of your Lucky 15 picks wins, and some add a percentage when all of them do. Those offers vary from site to site, so they’re switched off by default. Turn them on under the extra options if your bookie offers them. On a £1 Lucky 15 with one 5/1 winner, double odds lifts the single from £6 to £11. Still a loss on £15 staked, but a smaller one.
Need something more specific? There are dedicated pages for the each way calculator, acca calculator and Lucky 15, and a horse racing bet calculator that opens with each way and Rule 4 already switched on. To check what a price really means, the odds converter turns any odds into an implied chance.
More bets on a slip means more ways for some of it to win, not a better chance of profit. BeGambleAware.org is free and confidential if it stops being fun.