A cash out calculator tells you what your bet is actually worth right now. You put £10 on a team at 5/1 and they’re now 6/4 to win. The fair value of that bet is £24. If the bookmaker offers £21, that’s 87.5% of fair: you’d be giving up £3 on average to take the money now.
The free calculator above does that sum for any bet, plus partial cash outs, so you can decide with numbers instead of nerves.
Cash out calculator: what’s a fair offer?
A bet’s fair value is its potential return times its current chance of winning. In decimal odds that comes down to one line:
Fair cash out = stake × odds you took ÷ odds now
£10 × 6.0 ÷ 2.5 = £24. Bookmakers price cash out off their own odds, which carry a margin, and then usually take a little more. Offers between 90% and 97% of fair are common. Anything under 90% is expensive, and worth comparing with laying the bet off on an exchange, where the lay calculator shows the numbers.
Partial cash out
Take 50% of the £21 offer and you bank £10.50 now. The other half of the stake, £5, keeps running at 5/1. If the team wins you get £30 more, £40.50 in total. If they lose you still have the £10.50. Full cash out gives £21 either way, letting it ride gives £60 or nothing. Open “More options” in the calculator and set the share.
For accas
For an acca, the “odds now” are the current odds of the legs still to play, multiplied. Three legs won, one left at 2.10, means current odds of 2.10, and a £5 acca at 30.0 is fairly worth £5 × 30 ÷ 2.10 = £71.43. The cash out button is most tempting here, and it’s where the gap to fair value tends to be widest. If you’d still back the last leg at its current price, cashing out at a discount is selling it for less than you’d pay to buy it.
That’s the real test: cash out when you no longer like the bet, not when you’re nervous. The hedge calculator shows the other way to lock in a profit.
Cash out is a tool, not a safety net. Bet what you can afford to lose from the start. BeGambleAware.org is free and confidential if it stops being fun.