- Maths reviewed by Josh Miller
- Tested by Diana Westfield
A permed bet calculator saves you from the worst bit of a perm, which is working out how many bets you’ve actually placed. Perm five horses into Yankees and you’ve got five separate Yankees, 55 bets, so 10p a line costs £5.50. The free calculator above counts the lines, shows the full cost and settles the lot for any mix of winners, each way included.
Permed bet calculator: what a perm is
To perm is to take more selections than the bet needs and play every group of the right size. A Yankee needs four picks, so five picks permed into Yankees gives every four-horse group from the five, and there are five of those. Six picks give 15 Yankees and 165 bets. The calculator handles perms of Trixies, Patents, Yankees and Lucky 15s from up to eight selections; pick one in the Bet type list under ‘Permed bets’.
| Perm | Groups | Bets | Cost at 10p |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trixie from 4 | 4 Trixies | 16 | £1.60 |
| Patent from 4 | 4 Patents | 28 | £2.80 |
| Yankee from 5 | 5 Yankees | 55 | £5.50 |
| Yankee from 6 | 15 Yankees | 165 | £16.50 |
| Lucky 15 from 5 | 5 Lucky 15s | 75 | £7.50 |
| Yankee from 8 | 70 Yankees | 770 | £77.00 |
Each way doubles every figure in the table.
A perm Yankee against a Canadian
Both take five picks, so people often ask which is better. Take the prices loaded above, 2/1, 5/2, 3/1, 7/4 and 4/1, at 10p a line. The Canadian is 26 bets for £2.60. The perm Yankee is 55 bets for £5.50, because every double turns up in three of the Yankees, every treble in two and each four-fold in one, and there’s no five-fold at all.
- Two winners (2/1 and 5/2): the Canadian returns £1.05, the perm Yankee £3.15. Both lose money.
- Three winners: £7.85 against £19.35. The perm is back in profit, the Canadian isn’t.
- Four winners: £32.33 against £59.64.
- All five: £200.57 against £216.08. The Canadian’s five-fold almost closes the gap, for less than half the stake.
So the perm leans on the smaller bets. It gets you more back from a middling day, and you pay for that with double the outlay. Neither is better as such. It depends on whether you expect three winners or are dreaming of five.
Settling a perm by hand
You can, but it’s slow. Every group is settled as its own full-cover bet, then the returns are added up. A non-runner is void in every group it’s in, so the doubles and trebles it was part of carry on as if it had never been there, and Rule 4 and dead heats come off each line separately. The CasinoCalcs settler does it in one go and lists every line under ‘How every bet pays’, so you can check a bookie’s figure line by line. For a single full-cover bet, the Yankee calculator and Patent calculator are quicker, and the system bet calculator covers ‘every double from six’ style bets.
Big perms put a lot of money down in small pieces. Add up the total before you place it. BeGambleAware.org is free and confidential if it stops being fun.