- Maths reviewed by Josh Miller
- Tested by Diana Westfield
A Sport Select calculator is for the moment you’re standing at the counter with a filled-in sheet, wondering what the thing actually pays. Picks at 2.10, 1.75 and 2.40 come to 8.82 once you multiply them out, so ten dollars down would bring back $88.20 if all three land. The free calculator above does that sum for any number of picks, then goes one step further and shows how much of the ticket quietly goes to the margin.
Sport Select calculator: how a ticket pays
Most people know Sport Select through Pro-Line, the lottery’s sports game sold at Canadian retailers, and Pro-Line plays like a parlay. Your ticket is only paid if every pick on it comes in. Miss one and it’s done, however well the others went.
The numbers next to each game are decimal odds. A team listed at 2.10 would hand you $2.10 for every dollar if you backed it alone, and on a multi-pick ticket those figures get multiplied together before your wager is applied. That’s the whole calculation, and it’s why three ordinary-looking prices can turn ten dollars into almost ninety.
Watch out for ties. Plenty of games on the sheet offer a tie as its own outcome, and some sports treat a narrow finish as a tie under the printed rules, so a hockey or football result you’d call a win might not be one on the ticket. It’s worth five minutes with the rules before you fill in a long sheet.
More picks, bigger number, worse deal
Each price has a margin in it, the share the lottery keeps for itself. Nobody publishes that figure for these sheets, so the calculator’s advanced field uses 8% per pick as our own working guess; nudge it up or down if you think your prices are better or worse. On that guess, a one-game wager gives you back 92 cents per dollar over time. Stack three games and it’s nearer 78 cents, and by six it’s sliding towards 61 cents, even though the payout line on screen keeps getting more exciting.
None of that means you shouldn’t play a three-pick ticket on a Saturday. It’s a fair bit of fun for ten dollars. The six-pickers are the ones to be wary of, because they look like great value and are the exact opposite. Decide what you’ll spend before you start and keep to it.
Checking a ticket
Give each pick its own row and copy the odds off the sheet. The CasinoCalcs calculator returns the combined odds, the payout and the profit, plus two chances side by side: what the odds suggest and what’s left once the margin is taken out. Betting the same picks somewhere else? The parlay calculator does it with any bookmaker’s prices, and the odds converter turns decimal prices into American ones.
Keep sports betting a hobby, and don’t try to win back a losing ticket with a bigger one. If it stops being fun, BeGambleAware.org will talk to you for free, in confidence.