Accumulator Betting

 18.3.2015

Some may see accumulators as the Holy Grail of sports betting. They are so alluring, so attractive, so appealing that punters continually throw money at them in the hope of landing what would be, big profit. The accumulator bet is the very epitome of a low-risk/high-reward bet. For just a really small stake you could be walking away with huge, huge profit. It all sounds too good to be true right? But there is a caveat, in that accumulators are notoriously hard to pull off.

The more profit you shoot for, the higher the probability of your accumulator not happening. Accumulators can come in all sizes, everything from a three-fold up to a 20-fold and beyond get played every week across the world. Unlike full-coverage multi-bets such as a Lucky 15 which comprises of individual selections and only needs one selection to win to pay out some return, all of the selections inside an accumulator bet are linked together. They are entwined and you need them all to be realised in order to win the bet.

So you can build your bet from selections, most commonly in horse racing and soccer, and then sit and watch. There is nothing much harder to swallow in sports betting than seeing an accumulator lose by just one selection. It can be heartbreaking, but as the world of online betting grows, so do the options to protect yourself a little bit. Bookmakers who offer a cash-out option on accumulators are ideal, because if you see yourself in a position of having eight of your ten selections winning and you start getting nervous about waiting for the last two, you can always cash out your bet early (for a sacrifice in odds of course, and the potential on landing huge profit).

Odds inside an accumulator are cumulative odds, hence the name of the bet. Even though you will chosen several selections for your accumulator bet, you are essentially still playing only one bet. Let’s imagine that you played a six-fold accumulator for a one unit stake. That initial stake will be played on the first selection, and if it wins, then your winnings from that would be carried over and placed on the next selection and so and so forth. So by the time you have gotten to your sixth wager, you could have a large stake going down on that leg of the bet.

What it is important to remember though, if that sixth selection failed, you have only lost the one unit stake. Imagine that the stake carried through the rest of the bet had totalled up to a thousand units all being placed on that sixth and final leg. It sounds like a lot to lose, but you have still only physical lost that initial one unit stake. The thing to think about here, is would you ever go out a place a thousand unit stake on one outcome? That’s a huge risk and that is why accumulators are so appealing. You can have a shot at something big like that from a small stake.

So are accumulators worth playing? Obviously people do win with accumulator bets, but the bigger they are, the harder they are to get. While some punters won’t touch them because the likelihood of hitting an accumulator is so long, a lot of people do play them because after all you only need to put up a really small stake to try and earn some profit. It can also be an exhilarating ride watching and waiting for each selection in the bet to win (remembering you need all of the selections to win).