Even the most inexperience of bettors understands the principle behind a Straight bet. Indeed, the most popular markets that bookmakers offer are those that present the punter with a nice and easy thing to understand, such as Home Win, Draw or Away Win in the world of football.
The problem with such wagers is that they don’t give you the best chance to win much money, given that bookies add their Edge into the odds and ensure that they are much more likely to make money out of them than the people placing the bets are.
As a result, one of the things that people like to do is to add more options to their bets to increase their possible returns. The problem is, such accumulator bets need all selections to be successful in order or them to be winners. As a result, you might be better placed to opt for a permutation bet, which provides you with a chance to win even if some selections within the perm bet are losers.
You can either take a traditional perm, use a perm provided by the bookmaker or create your own perm by being selective in your betting choices.
Perms v Accas, What’s The Difference?
There are two main types of bets that you can place using multiple selections: accumulators and permutations. If you’re thinking of getting involved with that sort of bet then it is helpful to know what is involved in either case, making sure that you choose the bet type that is right for you.
Accumulators are the easiest bet to understand, given that they involve you making a number of selections and requiring them all to be winners in order for your overall bet to be a successful one. The most common Acca bet is placed on football fixtures.
Imagine looking at a weekend’s fixtures and deciding that you wanted to bet on all ten matches that were happening in the Premier League. You decide the outcome of the ten, choosing some home wins, some away wins and some draws, seeing eight of the ten selections go exactly as you predicted.
Despite your foresight in figuring out how those games were going to pan out, the fact that two of them were losers meant that your overall bet is a loser. The long odds that you were offered for the bet are irrelevant and your stake is lost.
With permutation bets, you give yourself the chance to win at least part of your bet if your selections were correct. If you pick the right sort of perm bet, you cover the accumulator as part of the wager anyway. It is a good way to give yourself more chance of seeing a return, with the downside being that you need to pay more to place a perm bet and you might still end up losing everything anyway.
A perm bet on the football fixtures, for example, would involve numerous different combinations of bets that you pay for individually, increasing the price.
Packaged Perm Bets
Bookmakers know that punters like their lives to be as easy as possible. As a result, they will offer numerous different permutation wagers that lay things out for the bettors nice and clearly. These pre-packaged perms are, for obvious reasons, the most popular to place with the betting public, so there’s a good chance that you will at least of heard of them, even if you’ve never placed one.
Here is a look at some of the most popular perms that bookmakers offer to their customers:
- Yankee: 11 bets on four selections. Made up of six Doubles, four Trebles, one fourfold Acca. If two or more selections win, you get a return
- Lucky 15: Effectively a Yankee with four Singles thrown in. One or more selections will give you a return
- Super Yankee: Also known as a Canadian, this wager consists of 26 bets across five selections. You get ten Doubles, ten Trebles, five fourfold Accas, one fivefold Acca. If two or more of your selections are successful, you’ll get a return
- Heinz: As a company, Heinz boasts of offering 57 varieties. As you might expect, a Heinz bet involves 57 wagers, which are placed on six selections. There are 15 Doubles, 20 Trebles, 15 fourfold Accas, six fivefold Accas and one sixfold Acca. You will get a return if two or more selections win
The easy to understand nature of these packaged perms is what makes them popular, which is also why bookies offer them. There are more options than just the ones written about here, but you can still get a sense of how such permutation bets work from that list.
The type of perm you’ll want to place will depend entirely on how many selections it is that you’re looking to bet on in the first place.
Bookie Made Perm Bets
The popular permutation bets tend to be offered by bookmakers in then sense that you can opt to place a Lucky 15 wager and will just need to select your own markets. The bookie basically offers you the pro forma and you fill in the details to make it all much clearer, being informed of the odds on all of the outcomes as a result.
These are not the same as bookmaker created perms, which is when the bookie decides on the selections that go into a bet and offer them to you. They might say “Liverpool to win the league & Mo Salah Top Scorer,” for example.
You will often see such bookmaker created perms in the shop windows of bookies on the high street. They are targeted offers based on the big match of the weekend, or on the match that will matter the most to local people. The likes of “Reading to beat Norwich City 3-0 and a Hat-Trick Scored” is an example of the kind of thing that you might see.
It is a perm bet, but the bookie has decided what the selections are in it and you can either take those selections or place a bet of your own, ignoring the offers completely.
Making Your Own Perms
There is absolutely nothing to stop you from making your own perms. You can do this in one of two ways, with the first being by looking at a standard perm and making alterations to it.
Imagine that you want to bet on four selections, for example, but you don’t want to place the Singles or Doubles. In that case, neither the Lucky 15 nor the Yankee bets are right for what you need. Even so, what you can do is use them as the basis for your perm, removing the Singles and Doubles and instead just betting on the trebles and the 4-fold acca yourself.
That is obviously an option open to you with all of the pre-packaged perms that are offered by bookies. Simple think of how many selections you want to bet on then look at what bets the relevant perms involve. You can then simply pick and choose the ones that you like and ignore the others, making your own perm from there. It is the perfect way of keeping things simple by using pre-packaged wagers, but tweaking things in order to make the bet a more interesting one that you feel is more accurately aligned with what you want.
The other option is to completely create your own permutation bet. This involves making your selections and adding them to your bet slip before choosing the actual wagers that you want to place with them. In other words, if you’ve got five selections then you can choose which ones to place as Doubles, which as Trebles and whether you want to place any sort of accumulator as part of the overall bet. You can also choose whether to place some Singles, no Singles or all of the Singles available to you to make it your own.
If you’re wanting to explore your options then you might want to consider using the Request A Bet feature, which will have a different name depending on the bookmaker that you use for your bets. In essence, this allows you to get in touch with your bookie and ask them to place a bet for you using specific markets that aren’t available via the normal means.
There are downsides to this, including the fact that the Edge built into those bets will be huge as there is no competition to make them keep the price down, but the benefits are that you can place your own bet that is creative as you want.
Bet Builders
The big problem with placing permutation bets is that you can’t place wagers on related contingencies. Thankfully, bookmakers have found a way of allowing you to bet on related contingencies that falls within their own remit.
The Bet Builder, which is similar to the Request A Bet feature insomuch as it allows you to choose your own perm selections, is important because it allows you to bet on related contingencies. The only limitation to it is that it ask you to choose your selections from a series of options chosen by the bookie.
If you’re particularly keen to bet on related contingencies but you still want to place a permutation bet then the Bet Builder-style wagers are the ones that you’ll want to look at. They are a way of keeping your options open in terms of what you’re betting on but still allow you control over your perms. That is the perfect combination for those that wish to place wagers and give themselves larger odds and more chances of seeing some sort of return.