- Fact-checked by Josh Miller
- Edited by Diana Westfield
Every multiple bet has a hidden price: put £1 on an eightfold acca and, on average, 47p comes back. Put the same eight picks in a Goliath and it’s 68p for every pound. The catch is that a £1 Goliath costs £247.
Every bet you can build in the CasinoCalcs bet calculator has a number like that: what it returns per pound staked over the long run. Bookies don’t print it on the slip, so we worked it out for all of them, from a single to a Goliath.
What each multiple bet returns per pound
These figures assume the bookie’s margin is 10% on every pick. Other margins are further down.
Straight bets and accas
| Bet | Picks | Bets | Average return per £1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single | 1 | 1 | 90.9p |
| Double | 2 | 1 | 82.6p |
| Treble | 3 | 1 | 75.1p |
| Fourfold acca | 4 | 1 | 68.3p |
| Fivefold acca | 5 | 1 | 62.1p |
| Sixfold acca | 6 | 1 | 56.4p |
| Sevenfold acca | 7 | 1 | 51.3p |
| Eightfold acca | 8 | 1 | 46.7p |
Full-cover bets
| Bet | Picks | Bets | Average return per £1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Patent | 3 | 7 | 85.1p |
| Lucky 15 | 4 | 15 | 81.9p |
| Trixie | 3 | 4 | 80.8p |
| Lucky 31 | 5 | 31 | 78.6p |
| Yankee | 4 | 11 | 78.6p |
| Canadian | 5 | 26 | 76.2p |
| Lucky 63 | 6 | 63 | 75.3p |
| Heinz | 6 | 57 | 73.6p |
| Super Heinz | 7 | 120 | 70.9p |
| Goliath | 8 | 247 | 68.1p |
The odds don’t change these numbers. A Yankee on four evens shots and a Yankee on four 10/1 shots both return 78.6p in the pound on average. What the odds change is how often you get anything back, which is the second half of this page.
Why does a longer bet cost more?
The margin is taken once per pick. A single at a 10% margin returns £1 ÷ 1.10 = 90.9p. A double pays the margin twice: 90.9p × 90.9p = 82.6p. A treble pays it three times, and so on.
That’s why a Yankee lands where it does. You’ve bought six doubles at 82.6p, four trebles at 75.1p and one fourfold at 68.3p, and averaged over the 11 bets that comes to 78.6p.
Three things follow from that.
The singles are the cheapest part of the bet. A Patent is a Trixie plus three singles, and it returns 85.1p against 80.8p. A Lucky 15 beats a Yankee, 81.9p against 78.6p, for the same reason. The singles are also the lines that pay when only one pick wins.
A Goliath costs about the same per pound as a plain fourfold. 68.1p against 68.3p. Just over half of a Goliath’s 247 bets are fourfolds and fivefolds, so it behaves like them.
Long accas lose more than half. By eight legs the average return is 46.7p. The headline payout looks huge because you’re being paid for eight results, and you’ve paid the margin on each one. The acca calculator shows the payout; this is the part it doesn’t.
How often do you get anything back?
The average hides how the money arrives. Here is each full-cover bet at £1 a line with every pick at 3/1.
| Bet | Cost | Nothing back | A profit | Winners needed for a profit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trixie | £4 | 86.9% | 13.1% | 2 |
| Patent | £7 | 46.1% | 13.1% | 2 |
| Yankee | £11 | 77.6% | 22.4% | 2 |
| Lucky 15 | £15 | 35.7% | 22.4% | 2 |
| Canadian | £26 | 68.1% | 8.1% | 3 |
| Lucky 31 | £31 | 27.6% | 8.1% | 3 |
| Heinz | £57 | 58.9% | 13.5% | 3 |
| Lucky 63 | £63 | 21.3% | 13.5% | 3 |
| Super Heinz | £120 | 50.3% | 5.1% | 4 |
| Goliath | £247 | 42.6% | 8.5% | 4 |
Look at the pairs. A Yankee and a Lucky 15 have the same chance of a profit, 22.4%. Adding the four singles doesn’t make you more likely to finish ahead. It turns “nothing back” from 77.6% into 35.7%, because one winner now returns £4 of your £15. The same holds for Trixie and Patent, Canadian and Lucky 31, Heinz and Lucky 63.
So the singles buy you smaller losses, not more wins. Whether that’s worth four extra pounds is your call. If you’re stuck between a Yankee and a Lucky 15 on the same four horses, that’s the trade: the Lucky 15 costs £4 more and gets you something back far more often, but it doesn’t make a winning day any more likely. Our page on what a Lucky 15 really pays shows how that changes with short and long prices.
More picks doesn’t mean a better chance either. A £120 Super Heinz at these odds finishes ahead about one time in twenty.
Bigger and smaller margins
The 10% we used above often isn’t what you get. Big football matches and the main horse races are priced tighter. Small fields, long shots and niche markets carry more, and a 10 to 12 runner UK handicap at early prices is nearer 18%, which is the figure our Lucky 15 page uses. The bookmaker margin calculator tells you what your own market carries.
| Bet | 5% margin | 10% margin | 15% margin | 18% margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single | 95.2p | 90.9p | 87.0p | 84.7p |
| Double | 90.7p | 82.6p | 75.6p | 71.8p |
| Fourfold acca | 82.3p | 68.3p | 57.2p | 51.6p |
| Lucky 15 | 90.2p | 81.9p | 74.8p | 71.0p |
| Goliath | 82.0p | 68.1p | 57.2p | 51.8p |
| Eightfold acca | 67.7p | 46.7p | 32.7p | 26.6p |
We tried it at four margins and the long bets came bottom every time; the only thing that moves is how far behind they finish, and that gets worse the more the bookie takes.
How we worked it out
If you want the sums behind it: we took each pick’s chance of winning as 1 ÷ (odds × (1 + margin)), so a 3/1 shot with a 10% margin wins 22.7% of the time, a bit under the 25% the price suggests. A line with k legs then returns (1 ÷ (1 + m)) to the power k for every pound staked, whatever the odds. Each bet type is the average of its lines. For the 3/1 table we then went through every possible mix of winners and losers, all 16 of them for a Yankee and 256 for a Goliath.
Don’t take our word for it. Open the bet calculator, choose a Yankee, put 3/1 against every horse and mark two of them as winners: it should say £16 back. Do the same on a Goliath and you get £16 there too, which is a grim number for a £247 slip.
What this leaves out
- We’ve ignored each way, Rule 4, dead heats and non-runners. The calculator handles them fine, they’d just turn these tables into soup.
- Bonuses. Many bookies pay double the odds for one winner on a Lucky 15, 31 or 63, or a percentage on top when every pick wins. Those lift the return, sometimes by a lot at long odds.
- Mixed odds. Real slips don’t have four picks at one price. The average return stays the same. The chances in the 3/1 table shift.
- Your edge, if you have one. If you can find prices that are too big, every number here improves. Most of us can’t.
If you’re new to these bets, full cover bets explained walks through what’s inside each one, and the bet cost calculator tells you what a slip costs before you place it.
More bets on a slip means more ways for some of it to come back, not a better chance of profit. BeGambleAware.org is free and confidential if it stops being fun.