What is a Lucky 15 bet in football?

A Lucky 15 bet is a way to leverage margins from your multiple bets. In essence, this type of bet requires you to pick four outright selections.

That really is as complex as it gets. The difference between a Lucky 15 and a normal four-fold accumulator is that your selections will now be grouped, so that you place a combination of 15 bets.

That sounds complicated but it really isn’t, as this testifies:

• Four Singles
• Six Doubles
• Four Trebles
• One Four-Fold

Hopefully that makes more sense now. So there are a maximum of 15 possible combinations for four selections, and you are betting on each of these. As a result, your staking plan will require you to budget for 15 bets, rather a single.

So instead of placing a £1 four-fold accumulator, you would now be placing a £15 Lucky 15 (£1 multiplied by 15 outcomes). Of course, you’d bet less than £1 per outcome in this example, but use this as a general guide.

A Lucky 15 can be placed on pretty much any sport under the sun, but it is most widely used for betting on football and horse racing.

Advantages of a Lucky 15 Compared to a Standard Betting Accumulator

The first advantage of placing a Lucky 15 is that you only need one of your four selections to come home to guarantee a return. This isn’t the case of course with a standard accumulator, where punters need all four to come in. If two of the four teams come in then you are assured three payouts (two singles and a double). So you can see how some kind of return happens– even if it’s not from all four selections.

With a four-fold, you need all four legs to be successful to yield the full return. But with a Lucky 15, in reality only two selections are needed to be successful.

How many times has your accumulator been let down by one team or one horse in the past? It can be so frustrating when that happens; especially in desperate circumstances, e.g. if your team concedes a late equaliser or your horse falls at the last fence. If you place a Lucky 15 then you can relax safe in the knowledge that your other three picks came in and so you WILL yield something back from an investment.

Lucky 15 Football Bet: An Example

Let’s try a working example to get us started:

1. Liverpool to beat West Ham at Evens
2. Arsenal to beat Spurs at 21/20
3. Manchester City to beat Aston Villa at 1/4
4. Chelsea to beat Everton at 23/20

Let’s place a £1 bet on each outcome, and thus our total outlay is £15. The potential return from this wager is £65.

So let’s take a look at the set-up:

So this is what we’re left with: a table of potential outcomes.

If just Liverpool in….

Then we would win £2 for their single (£1 stake at Evens), but ultimately lose £13.

If Liverpool and Arsenal win….

If this pair won we would return two singles (Liverpool at £2 and Arsenal at £2.05) and the double (Liverpool and Arsenal at £4.10), and so our total return would be £8.15. Alas, our net returns would be -£6.85.

If Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester City all win….

Things start to look a little rosier if three of our four selections are successful. So we’d trouser three single wins (Liverpool £2, Arsenal £2.05 and Man City £1.25) to give us £5.30.

And then we’d have three doubles too: Liverpool & Arsenal £4.10, Liverpool & Man City £2.50 and Arsenal & Man City £2.56. Our return from our doubles would be a combined £9.16, and if we add our singles wins into the mix then our grand total stands at £14.46.

But then don’t forget about the treble for all three selections coming in. This returns £5.13 in our example, and added to our other returns yields a total of £19.59.

And so the net return from our Lucky 15 is +£4.59.

Lucky 15 Betting: In Summary

As you will have seen from the example above, a Lucky 15 is great bet for two main reasons: if one selection comes in then at least we get some kind of return on our stake (hopefully enough for a bag of chips on Saturday night!), and secondly we can see that even if three of our selections are successful we will walk away with something.

Of course there is a certain amount of risk – football and horse racing are both unpredictable. But we can leverage risk by ensuring that at least one of our picks is a banker.

It’s crucial not to go chasing big prizes, and make sure you do your homework to find four selections with a great potential of coming home. You can adopt one of the following strategies:

• Four Bankers
• Two Bankers, Two Wildcards
• Four Wildcards

Obviously the Four Bankers approach should yield some kind of return, the Two Bankers, Two Wildcards tactic could help to enhance your winnings should at least one come in, while the Four Wildcards approach is one for those who like living dangerously.