What is a Heinz Bet? The Heinz Bet Explained
A Heinz bet is a multiple wager that provides full coverage of six selections for doubles, trebles, fourfolds, fivefolds and one sixfold accumulator. It costs 57 bets and can include selections in all kinds of sports. In this guide, we explain how the Heinz bet works and how to use it.
How Does a Heinz Bet Work?
This wager is said to have been named after the famous ‘57 varieties’ slogan of the Heinz food company. Its 57 bets comprise every possible double, treble, fourfold, fivefold and sixfold that can be made from its six selections, as follows:
Bet Type Number of Bets Doubles 15 Trebles 20 Fourfolds 15 Fivefolds 6 Sixfolds 1 You only need two winning selections to get a return from a Heinz, but unless the resulting double pays odds of 57/1 or more, that kind of outcome wouldn’t be enough to cover the cost of the bet. Of course, the more winners you get, the better, as more parts of the Heinz bet will pay out. Here’s a table showing how the number of bets paid out is determined by the number of winners you are able to pick.
Successful Selections Doubles Trebles Fourfolds Fivefolds Sixfolds 1 0 0 0 0 0 2 1 0 0 0 0 3 3 1 0 0 0 4 6 4 1 0 0 5 10 10 5 1 0 6 15 20 15 6 1 How many winning selections you need to cover the cost of the Heinz 57 bet depends on the odds of your winners. For example, you’d need four winners at average odds of 1/1 each to show a profit or three winners at average odds of 9/4.
How Does an Each Way Heinz Bet Work?
Those of you who like to spend time at our recommended betting sites for horse racing will be pleased to hear that you can also make a Heinz bet each way. This will cost you twice as much as a win-only Heinz (114 bets rather than 57), but it will give you a payout (albeit a modest one) with as few as two placed runners.
Whether or not the place coverage is worth the extra 57 bets required is something for you to decide. To illustrate the difference, let’s imagine that we want to make a size horse bet on each of the first six races at Kelso and that our selections are as follows:
If all six of these selections were to win their races, a £1 win-only Heinz would pay £13,266.03, while a £1 each-way Heinz would pay £13,661.74. That isn’t a massive difference. Of course, if all six horses merely placed (with no winners), the each-way betting approach would pay off, returning you £395.71 compared to zero for a win-only bet.
Why Make a Heinz Bet?
At a cost of 57 bets, a Heinz isn’t a wager that anyone places out of habit (although it’s still a lot less expensive than a Super Heinz). So why do people choose to make Heinz bets over potentially cheaper alternatives? There are several reasons:
Large Potential Returns
As we’ve just seen, with Heinz betting, six winning selections can yield massive returns relative to the outlay required. It isn’t easy to get six winners from six, of course, but it’s not impossible by any means. That makes this wager appealing to bettors who occasionally want to take a high-risk/high-reward approach to betting.
Flexibility
Because you can include all kinds of sporting selections in a Heinz, this wager offers enormous flexibility. You can have six selections from the same sport, as in the horse racing Heinz bet example given earlier, or you can go to the opposite extreme and include one selection from each of six different sports. This allows you to make your selections from the full range of sports offered by UK online betting sites and bundle your best picks together in a Heinz.
Sustained Interest
There is no rule stating that all events you include in a Heinz must run on the same day or even in the same week. That means you can deliberately create a wager for the specific purpose of giving you sustained interest over an extended period of time. For example, if you enjoy both tennis and football betting, you could visit any of our top tennis betting sites and bet on who you think will win each of the four major tennis championships and also the FA Cup and UEFA Champions league. That would give you months of entertainment for your money.
How to Place a Heinz Bet Online
However you choose to use a Heinz in betting, actually placing a bet online is as simple and straightforward as you could want. Here’s how to go about it, step-by-step:
1. Select Your Picks
The first thing you need to do is select the picks you want to include in the wager itself. Explore the markets available and use your skill and judgement to select six outcomes that you think have a great chance of winning. Click on the odds of each pick to add it to your betslip.
In the screencap below, you’ll see that we’ve added six picks to our slip from a variety of sports that include football, horse racing, darts, snooker and more.
2. Enter Your Heinz Stake
Next, look under the betslip, and you’ll see the various ways you can bet on the selections you’ve added. Scroll down until you get to the Heinz option, and enter your stake. The betslip will then show you how much you can expect to win if all six of your selections are successful.
In the above example, we’ve entered £1 as our stake. That means the Heinz bet would cost us £57 in total. If all six of our selections were to win, our returns would be £1,535.25.
3. Place the Bet
The final step is to hit the Place Bet button. But before you do that, take a second or two to double-check the picks you’ve added, the bet you’ve selected and the stake you’ve entered. It’s easy to make mistakes, and it’s better to find them now so that you can correct them. Submit the bet when you’re confident that everything is as you want it to be, and your stake will be deducted from your account at that point.
And that’s all there is to it. When all six of your events have finished, any winnings that are due to you will be added to your account automatically.
How to Work Out Your Heinz Bet Returns
You can quickly and easily calculate your Heinz bet returns by visiting our Betting Calculators page and using the free Heinz bet calculator. For those of you who would prefer to do the job manually, the process you need to follow is described below. Note that this description assumes you’ve picked six winners from six in a win-only Heinz.
- Calculate the return due from each of your 15 winning doubles. For each double, multiply the decimal odds of the two winners together, and then multiply by your stake. Add the resulting sums together. This is your Doubles Return total.
- Calculate the return due from each of your 20 winning trebles. This time, you should multiply the decimal odds of the three winners together before multiplying by your stake. Add all of the returns together to give you a Trebles Return total.
- Follow the same procedure to calculate each of your 15 fourfolds, 6 fivefolds and your sixfold accumulator. In each case, multiply the decimal odds of the winners involved and multiply again by your stake. Then add all those figures together to give you an Accumulators Return total.
- Finally, add your Doubles Return total, your Trebles Return total and your Accumulators Return total. The resulting figure is what you can expect back from the bookie.
With 57 different bets to calculate, doing things manually will take some time. It will take even longer with an each-way Heinz, especially if there are any Rule 4 deductions to consider, so using a Heinz calculator is definitely the preferred option.
Heinz Betting Tips and Strategies
With the Heinz bet explained in some detail, we will now share some tips that you might want to bear in mind when using this popular wager. They won’t guarantee your success with the bet (there are rarely any guarantees in betting), but they could certainly improve your chances.
Be Selective
It is only sensible to use a Heinz in betting when you have six solid selections that you are completely confident in. For that reason, don’t be afraid to be very selective about when you make this kind of bet. If you have a half dozen picks that you are supremely confident about, a Heinz might be a good wager to make. But if you only have three or four such picks, skip the Heinz and go with a bet better suited to that number of selections, such as a treble or a Yankee.
Stake for Fun
Our previous Heinz betting examples have used £1 as the unit stake purely for illustration purposes, but this is a wager that is best used for its entertainment value. As such, you should stake primarily for fun. Many horse racing bettors like to wager just 10p per line, which costs £5.70 for a win-only Heinz or £11.40 for an each-way Heinz. Depending on which bookmaker you bet with, you could stake even less.
Be Creative
We said earlier that one of the strengths of this bet is that it can deliver sustained interest. Our third tip is to consider maximising this aspect of the wager by choosing picks that will provide you with plenty of entertainment over an extended period. For example, you could pick a football team to win the English Premier League, a tennis player to win the Wimbledon Championships, a golfer to win the US Masters, and so on. That approach will keep your bet running for months, and if you’re skilled at predicting tournament winners, it could pay off handsomely.
Advantages and Drawbacks of Heinz Bets
As is often the case with many multiple wagers, the Heinz isn’t for everyone. It has a number of advantages but also a few potential drawbacks that also need to be noted. Here’s our summary of both so that you can decide whether or not this is a bet that you’d like to make in the future.
Heinz Bet Advantages:
- The Heinz makes it possible to win huge returns.
- You’ll get a return with as few as two winners.
- Selections can come from any sports you like.
- You can bet on events days, weeks or months apart.
- You can use small unit stakes to keep it affordable.
- It’s available at most online betting sites.
Potential Drawbacks:
- Every Heinz wager you make will cost you 57 bets.
- Returns from just a few winners are unlikely to cover the cost.
- Most picks need to win to get the best out of the bet.
Alternatives to Heinz Bets
If using a Heinz in betting isn’t quite what you want to do, there are a few other wagers that you might want to explore as possible alternatives. Here are three of the main ones:
The Lucky 63
This is the big brother of the Lucky 15 and the Lucky 31. It works the same way as a Heinz bet but will also cover your six selections for singles, bringing the total cost up to 63 bets. This bet will give you a return with just one winning selection, but you’ll usually need the majority of your selections to win for the bet to be worth its while.
The Super Yankee
The Super Yankee covers five selections instead of six. It provides coverage for 10 doubles, 10 trebles, 5 fourfolds and 1 fivefold accumulator. That means it costs 26 bets, which is less than half of the cost required for a Heinz. You can make a Super Yankee to win only or – if you’re betting on horse racing and/or greyhound racing – each way.
A Sixfold Accumulator
The simplest alternative to a Heinz is a straightforward sixfold accumulator. This will give you a big payout if all six of your selections win – something you’d be hoping for with a Heinz anyway – but it won’t cover you for any smaller combinations. On the plus side, it only costs one bet, and you could easily bet on a handful of smaller combinations separately if you wanted to do so.
Conclusion
Now that you know what a Heinz bet is and how it works, you’ll be able to decide whether or not you’d like to use it in the future. We don’t think it’s a ‘bread-and-butter’ bet that should be used on a daily basis, but as an occasional wager to small stakes, it’s got a great deal going for it.
FAQs
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