accumulator bets

People can get more than you bargained for with accumulator bets. Huge winnings are often in the news such as a man placing a stake of 50p and ending up with a million pounds. He could have been famous but chose to remain anonymous. This accumulator was on 8 horses, the BBC reports; “The first horse that won on Friday was called Isn't That Lucky and the last winner was A Dream Come True.”

To win a million from 50p in a single bet you would have to find something to bet on at 2,000,000/1 but such things are rare and unusual and seemingly much more unlikely than even these odds indicate. The Liberals winning the UK General Election 2010 is only 250/1, the best odds I could find! You can find other wild and weird bets under ‘novelty betting’ sections on some companies websites. The biggest odds I could find on a quick search through a well known betting site was Alien extraterrestrial life found this year (2010) at 500/1, by 2011 the odds are the same as a Liberal win at the election; 250/1!

Accumulator bets, terminology

So for big wins from small stakes it looks like accumulator bets are the way to go, right? Yes indeed. There are a few terms you need to know but they are quite obvious. Given that accumulator bets are a series of bets in which the original stake is accrued and re-invested; a double is simply a two bet accumulator. Treble is three successive bets, after this the term changes to Xfold (where X is a number), so a 6 bet accumulator will be called a sixfold accumulator.

Accumulator bets, the maths

How can accumulator bets win so big? - it’s in the maths again, the chances and the odds of an outcome are multiplied between bets. But it still feels like you are using a small amount of money to make a lot and the odds don’t feel as outrageous as bets such as the Alien life question. Another part of the fun of accumulator bets is that you don’t need to stick to any single sport or event. You might get a great football tip and a couple of horse racing tips and feel like combining them into one bet - that would be a triple accumulator! But remember, to win accumulator bets, all your chosen bets must win. If there is a faulty link in a chain it will break there, just like your luck.

Let's look at an example of a fourfold accumulator bet compared to four individual bets. For simplicity we will assume you have £4. For the 4 events we are comparing single bet income (£1 on each event = £4) to multiple (£4 bet once on this single list of events happening)

Event	Odds	Single bet	Accumulator
Golf - Tiger Woods wins US Open	5/1	6	0
Horse 1, at race 1	20/1	21	0
Horse 2, at another race	11/2	6.50	0
Football, Rovers to beat United	3/1	4	0
TOTAL INCOME		£37.50	£3,276 - wow!

And if your accumulator was fivefold with another bet on a 5/1 outcome your winnings would be nearing £20k! It's easy to see the potential of accumulator bets, with the low initial stakes and thrilling payouts possible. There are a large number of online tools to help you get the best accumulators, just as there are for best odds. With accumulator bets it makes even more difference to your earnings so it's well worth looking in to.