Accumulator bets or ‘accas’ are when you bet on over 4 different selections, all to win. Accumulators are a great way of winning big as the odds for each bet improves as the selection before it wins.
For example let’s assume that you bet on 4 teams to win with the following odds.
Chelsea 1/2
Arsenal 1/2
Swansea 3/1
Newcastle 5/1
Now if you placed £2.50 on these choices individually and they all won, your profit will look like this…
Chelsea – £1.25
Arsenal – £1.25
Swansea – £7.50
Newcastle – £12.50
So, your £10 worth of bets has yielded you £22 of profit, not bad but to predict 4 outcomes and get them all right surely deserves a little more than that. Now let’s assume you had placed an accumulator bet on the same 4 outcomes your profit would be…
£132.50 !!!!
A little different from the measly £22 you’d have won if betting individually. Here is how it works, I will use the decimal odds to make it easier, the odds stay the same but for example1/2 becomes 1.5.
Basically the odds are multiplied against each other like so…
Chelsea – 1.5
Arsenal – 1.5
Swansea – 4.0
Newcastle – 6.0
Which means that to calculate the winnings we do this… 1.5 x 1.5 x 4.0 x 6.0 = 54… 54 multiplied by £2.50 gives us the magic figure of £132.50.
You can of course add as many selections to the accumulator as you wish and whilst the odds for winning go sky high, so does the risk factor, remember that sport is fickle and predicting 5,6,7 or more outcomes is a tricky thing to do, unless you have a crystal ball!
Something I like to do from time to time is to split my bet. Take the example I have just shown you, if you have £10 to bet with it might be worth betting £1.25 on the individual bets, a bet of £5 with a return of £11, and place £5 on the accumulator which will return £66..25. This is a good choice if you have a selection within the 4 that you aren’t super confident about and at least this way if a single team let’s you down then you will only lose a little money and you can cover a bit of your bet. You will kick yourself of course if they all come in and you only win £76.26 (£66.25 + £11) when you could’ve won £132.50 but it is certainly an option to consider.
That in a nutshell is an accumulator, the route to big wins.