What is a Yankee Bet? The Yankee Bet Explained
A Yankee bet is a multiple bet that covers four selections for six doubles, four trebles and one fourfold accumulator. In this guide, we explain how the bet works, why it’s so popular, how to place a Yankee bet online and how to calculate your returns when you win.
How Does a Yankee Bet Work?
To make a Yankee bet, you need to pick four unrelated selections. You can include selections from any sport or mixture of sports, but Yankee horse racing bets are most common. Whatever the case, it is probably easiest to think of a Yankee bet as a bundle of 11 different bets. These will cover your four selections for every possible combination of double and trebles, as well as for one fourfold accumulator.
A win-only Yankee bet will cost you 11 bets, and an each-way Yankee bet will cost 22 bets. With a win-only Yankee, you will need two of your selections to win for the bet to give you a return. Similarly, for an each-way Yankee to give you a return, at least two of your selections must win or get a place. The more successful selections you have, the bigger return you can expect, as illustrated in the table below:
Successful Selections Winning Doubles Winning Trebles Winning Fourfolds 1 0 0 0 2 1 0 0 3 3 1 0 4 6 4 1 Yankee Bet Example
To show you how the Yankee bet works in practice, let’s look at a real-life example. Below, we’ve picked four horses to win their races at Newcastle with Betfair for a £1 Yankee.
For the purpose of discussion, we’ll designate these four horses as A, B, C and D, respectively.
A = Percy Willis at odds of 3.00 B = Big Narstie at odds of 3.75 C = Golden Rainbow at odds of 1.57 D = Miss Rainbow at odds of 3.75 - If two of our horses win - let’s say A and B - our Yankee will pay us one winning double on that pair.
- If three horses win (A, B and C), we will land three winning doubles (AxB, BxC and AxC) and one winning treble (AxBxC).
- Should all four horses win (A, B, C and D), we will land six winning doubles (AxB, AxC, AxD, BxC, BxD and CxD), four winning trebles (AxBxC, AxBxD, AxCxD and BxCxD) and one fourfold (AxBxCxD).
As you can see, the ideal scenario is for all four of our selections to win. That would give us a return on all 11 bets that make up the horse racing Yankee wager.
How to Work Out a Yankee Bet
Working out the returns from a winning or partially-winning Yankee takes a bit of time, but it isn’t rocket science by any means. Here’s the process to work through, step by step:
1. Calculate the Doubles Return
First, calculate the returns from each of your winning doubles. To do that, multiply the decimal odds of the two winning selections together, then multiply by your stake. Going back to our Yankee horse racing example, if both of our A and B selections win at 3.00 and 3.75, and we’ve placed a £1 Yankee bet, our calculation would be:
3.00 x 3.75 x 1 = 11.25
Repeat this calculation for every winning double that you’ve landed and add the resulting figures together to give you your total Doubles Return.
2. Calculate the Trebles Return
You now need to do a similar thing for each of your winning trebles. For each treble, multiply the odds of the three horses together and then multiply by your stake. If our C selection wins at odds of 1.57, our calculation for the treble AxBxC would be:
3.00 x 3.75 x 1.57 x 1 = 17.66
If you only have three winners, you’ll only have one treble to calculate. But if all four selections win, there will be four treble payouts, so you’ll need to calculate each one separately. When you’ve done that, add the resulting figures together to give you your total Trebles Return.
3. Calculate the Fourfold Return
You will only need to do this if all four of your selections are successful, and by now, you should be able to guess what’s coming. Simply multiply the decimal odds of your four selections together, and then multiply by your stake to determine your Fourfold Return. Our D selection was priced at 3.75, so our calculation would be:
3.00 x 3.75 x 1.57 x 3.75 x 1 = 66.23
4. Calculate Your Total Return
Now that you have your return figures for all of your doubles, trebles and the fourfold, all you have to do is add them all together to determine your Total Return. If all of our selections had won their races, our total return would have been £218.87, which would have given us a profit of £207.87.
Note: We’re all for using the old grey matter, but if you some help when calculating returns from your doubles, trebles and fourfolds, you’re welcome to use our free Bet Calculator. That will be especially helpful in each-way betting, where the arithmetic can be a bit more complicated.
Why Make a Yankee Bet?
Yankee betting is very popular among those who frequent online bookmakers in the UK, and there are several good reasons why. Here are the main ones:
Payout Potential
A Yankee bet gives you the chance of landing a bumper payout when all of your selections win. In our example, a £1 win-only Yankee returned just over £218 for a total outlay of £11, and the biggest odds on our betslip were 3.75 (11/4). Bigger-priced selections would give you the chance to win even more.Lower Success Threshold
Another reason why people like to make a Yankee bet is that it's more likely to give you a return than a straightforward fourfold accumulator. With an accumulator, you need all of your selections to win to get a return. But a Yankee bet is certain to give you a return even if you only have two or three winning selections. That return might not cover the entire outlay (it depends on the odds of your winners), but it’s a lot better than receiving nothing at all.Enhanced Excitement
A third advantage of a Yankee bet is that it can be a lot more exciting than a straightforward win single. Watching your selections win one by one, bringing you ever closer to the best possible payout, is something that never fails to get the adrenaline pumping.Terrific Flexibility
Last, but not least, a Yankee bet is incredibly flexible. While it's most popular in horse racing betting, it isn't a bet that's exclusive to horse racing. You could bet on the outcome of a football match, a tennis match, a boxing match and a cricket match, all in the same wager. Not all of your selected events have to take place on the same day, so a Yankee bet could give you days or even weeks of entertainment, depending on the selections you make.
How to Make a Yankee Bet Online
With the Yankee bet explained from a general perspective, we’ll now show you how to make the wager online. It’s actually quite straightforward, as the step-by-step guide below illustrates.
1. Make Your Selections
Head to your favourite online betting site and start exploring the markets to see what you’d like to bet on. When you find a competitor you’d like to include in your Yankee, simply click its odds to add it to your betslip. Then explore a bit more to find your second selection and add that to your betslip as well.
Continue like this until you have four selections on your betslip. You can bet on horse racing, football, darts, snooker - whatever you like. So, let’s do just that at Betfair:
Here we’ve added a horse called Longshanks to win the 14:00 race at Exeter, Bradford to beat Notts County, Nathan Aspinall to beat Rob Cross in darts, and Chris Wakelin to beat Jordan Brown in the snooker World Open. Note that we didn’t pick these selections based on form - we simply added them to our slip for illustration purposes.
2. Scroll to the Yankee Option
Next, turn your attention to the virtual betslip and scroll down until you find the option to place a Yankee bet. You’ll then be able to enter your stake, and the potential returns you can expect if all of your selections win will be displayed automatically, as shown below:
3. Check and Submit
Last, but not least, have a glance over the betslip to make sure you’re happy with your selections, the bet type and the stake you’ve entered. If you are, tap the Place Bet button (or whatever the equivalent is at your preferred betting site). The cost of the Yankee bet will be deducted from your account right then and there. When all of the events have finished, any winnings that are due will be credited back to your account automatically.
What is a Super Yankee Bet?
We wouldn’t be doing our job properly if we didn’t point out that there’s an expanded form of the Yankee bet called a Super Yankee. This works in much the same way as a regular Yankee, but with a Super Yankee, you get to pick five selections instead of four. It will cover those selections for ten doubles, ten trebles, five fourfold accumulators and one fivefold accumulator. That makes 26 bets in all, or 52 for an each-way Super Yankee.
Conclusion
The Yankee bet is an attractive, flexible and exciting multiple bet that gives you the chance to land a big payout for a relatively modest outlay. While it shouldn’t be the main type of bet that you place if you’re a serious sports bettor, it can be a great ‘fun bet’ to make for entertainment purposes when you want to be involved in four different events.
FAQs
What’s a Yankee bet?
How many bets in a Yankee?
How many winners do you need in a Yankee?
What is better Lucky 15 or Yankee?
What is a permed Yankee?
9.5
22/04/249.5
05/04/249.8
08/05/249.7
15/04/249.7
22/04/249.5
22/03/249.5
02/04/24
