- Maths reviewed by Josh Miller
- Tested by Diana Westfield
Can you still do the football pools? Yes, every week of the season, though the coupon is mostly on a phone now and the man who came round on a Thursday to collect it has long gone. The game hasn’t changed much: you pick the matches you think will end as score draws, and the entries with the most points share the prize fund. The CasinoCalcs calculator above deals with the part that confuses people most, the perm, and tells you how many lines your selection makes and what it costs.
How the football pools work
Each week there’s a list of matches, traditionally 49 of them across the English and Scottish leagues. You choose a set number per line, and each match you pick earns points depending on how it finishes. On the classic scoring a score draw like 1-1 or 2-2 is worth the most, a 0-0 a bit less, and a home or away win the least. The whole idea is spotting draws, which is harder than it sounds: roughly one match in five or six ends as a score draw, and you can’t see which ones in advance any better than anyone else.
What makes the pools different from a bet with a bookmaker is that you’re not playing against fixed odds. The prize money is a pool, and it’s shared between the top entries. A week full of draws means lots of people score well and the dividends are small; a week with almost none means a lucky few share a lot.
Perms, explained with a pen and paper
A perm, short for permutation, lets you pick more matches than a line needs and covers every combination. Say a line needs 8 matches and you like 10. Every way of choosing 8 from your 10 is one line: that’s 45 lines. Pick 12 and it’s 495. The numbers climb quickly, which is why the calculator shows the cost before you commit.
| Matches picked | Lines of 8 |
|---|---|
| 9 | 9 |
| 10 | 45 |
| 11 | 165 |
| 12 | 495 |
| 13 | 1,287 |
The point of a perm is that if 8 of your 10 come in as score draws, one of your 45 lines has all eight, wherever they fall in your list. Without the perm you’d need to have guessed exactly which 8 to put on a single line.
Is it worth doing?
As a weekly flutter with a social side, plenty of people think so, and the cost per line is small. As a way to make money, the maths isn’t kind. If each of your picks has about an 18% chance of being a score draw, eight from eight is around 1 in 900,000, and the pool takes its cut before paying out. The chance figures above use that kind of rough rate and assume the matches are unrelated, which is near enough to give you the scale.
If you’d rather bet on draws at fixed odds, the 1X2 calculator gives a draw chance for any match from expected goals, and the correct score calculator shows how likely 1-1 or 2-2 really is. For the combinations maths on its own, there’s the combination calculator.
A few pence a line adds up over a season. BeGambleAware.org has free support if it stops being a bit of fun.