Yankee Calculator

Each of the 11 bets is settled on its own. A double multiplies two winning selections together, a treble multiplies three, and the four-fold multiplies all four. Any bet containing a losing selection returns nothing, but every other bet still stands — which is why a Yankee can pay out with two legs beaten.

Take a £1 Yankee (total outlay £11.00) on four selections at decimal odds of 2.00, 3.00, 4.00 and 5.00, with all four winning:

That is £345.00 back from £11.00 staked. The picture changes fast with losers. With only the 2.00 and 3.00 selections winning you collect a single double worth £6.00 — a £5.00 loss on the £11.00 outlay, even though you picked two winners out of four. With one winner you collect nothing at all.

The Number Most Yankee Calculators Leave Out

Two winners in a Yankee produce exactly one double, and that double has to cover all 11 lines. So the break-even test for a two-winner Yankee is a single multiplication: the two prices have to reach 11.00 in combined decimal odds. Two 3.00 shots come to 9.00 and lose money; 3.00 and 4.00 come to 12.00 and clear it. Punters routinely back four selections around 2.50 and assume two winners is a respectable result — at those prices two winners return £6.25 on an £11.00 outlay.

The same logic applies further up. Three winners produce three doubles and a treble, so their combined value has to reach 11.00 as well; at odds of 2.00, 3.00 and 4.00 that comes to £50.00 on an £11.00 outlay, comfortably clear. The awkward zone in a Yankee is not three winners, it is two.

A Lucky 15 is a Yankee plus four singles: 15 lines instead of 11 on the same four selections. Compared at the same total outlay — the comparison the results panel above runs on your own numbers — the trade is straightforward. Spreading £11.00 over 15 lines puts £0.73 on each bet instead of £1.00, so at odds of 2.00, 3.00, 4.00 and 5.00 all four winning returns £263.27 as a Lucky 15 against £345.00 as a Yankee. With a single winner, though, the Yankee returns nothing while the Lucky 15 still pays its single.

A Yankee has no singles, so one winner returns nothing at any price. With two winners at the same price it needs 3.32 — the square root of its 11 lines — to get the outlay back. The Lucky 15 buys the four singles for 36.4% more outlay and moves that figure to 3.00, while turning the one-winner case from a certain loss into a 15.00 break-even.

Whether that trade is worth making is a question with a number attached, not a matter of temperament: at £15.00 into each bet with all four selections at 2/1, the singles are worth £3.00 and £2.73 with one and two winners, and cost £10.64 and £76.36 with three and four. The Yankee is the better structure when you expect your selections to hold up together, and the worse one when you expect one or two to carry the slip. The singles are not a bonus in a Lucky 15: they are paid for by taking money off every other line.

Those four figures price one afternoon at one price. The section that follows sets the same trade out at every price, so this section is the structure of the trade and the next one is what it costs. For a straight four-fold on the same selections, use the Accumulator Calculator; for the full-coverage version with singles, the Lucky 15 Calculator. Every bet in the family is worked through the same way in our comparison of full-cover bets.

The figures above price one afternoon at 2/1, and a table built on a single price is an anecdote. Run the same equal-outlay comparison at every price instead — £15.00 into each bet, so £1.00 across the fifteen Lucky 15 lines against £1.36 across the eleven Yankee lines — and each row has its own crossover: the price above which the Yankee is the better use of the same money.

Two of the four rows never change hands at any price, and the two that do change hands do so at prices that sit outside ordinary betting. Five and a half is a price most four-selection slips never contain, so the two-winner row belongs to the Lucky 15 in practice; 1.74 is shorter than almost anything a punter takes, so the three-winner row belongs to the Yankee in practice. The singles are not cover added on top of the bet. They are paid for by shaving every multiple, and the trade is settled well before the prices get interesting.

The All-Win Bonus Is Priced for One Bet in the Family

Bookmakers commonly pay a bonus when all four selections in a Lucky 15 win, and 10% of the return is the usual figure. That bonus is a term of the operator, not a rule of the bet, and it is the only thing that can move the four-winner row. Applied to the total return, 10% brings a crossover into existence at 1.30 — below that price the Lucky 15 is ahead with all four winning, above it the Yankee still is. The bonus large enough to square the two bets at 3.00 (2/1) is 29.95%, which no operator pays.

Run the same calculation across the family and the standard 10% stops looking like a flat concession:

The 10% covers the singles on a Lucky 63 and on nothing else. Six singles out of 63 lines are 9.5% of the slip, and a tenth of the return pays for them with a little to spare; four singles out of 15 lines are 26.7%, and a tenth of the return covers about a third of what they cost. Read across the two middle columns and the pattern is plain: the bonus is calibrated for the bet where the singles are cheapest, and every smaller bet in the family is paid the same percentage for a much larger deduction.

Two settlement terms sit outside this arithmetic and both belong to the operator rather than the bet. The first is the consolation paid when only one selection wins, usually at double the odds, which widens a lead the Lucky 15 already holds on that row and creates no crossover. The second is whether the bonus is applied to total returns or to the accumulator alone, which changes the figures above. Check both in the terms before treating any of this as your own. The whole family, bet by bet, is worked through in our comparison of full-cover bets, and the five-selection version of the same trade is on the Canadian calculator.