Lucky 63 Calculator: Six Horses, 63 Bets, Win or Each Way

The cost of a Lucky 63 creeps up on people, which is why the Lucky 63 calculator above opens with an ordinary day. It is loaded with 10p on six horses at 6/4, 9/4, 3/1, 9/2, 7/1 and 12/1. Three won: the 6/4, 9/4 and 7/1 shots. Three were beaten. The bet cost £6.30 and returns £13.29.

Half the horses won, and the bet a little more than doubled its stake. That is a fair result, and it shows the shape of a Lucky 63 well: 63 lines is a lot of money spread thinly, and it takes several winners, or a couple at big prices, before the big lines start to pay.

Which of the 63 lines paid

Number the horses 1 to 6 in the order above. The winners are 1, 2 and 5. Every line containing 3, 4 or 6 lost, which rules out 56 of the 63.

The seven that survived are the three singles, the three doubles among the winners and their one treble.

The singles on the 6/4, 9/4 and 7/1 horses return 25p, 32.5p and 80p: £1.38 in total. The doubles 1+2, 1+5 and 2+5 return £0.81, £2.00 and £2.60: £5.41. The treble 1+2+5 returns 10p × 2.5 × 3.25 × 8, which is £6.50.

Add them and you have £13.29. The calculator’s summary gives the same picture by size: singles three of six, doubles three of fifteen, trebles one of twenty, and nothing bigger. The treble on its own is almost half the return, and the singles, the lines that give a Lucky bet its name, contribute about a tenth of it.

Setting up the Lucky 63 calculator

Choose Lucky 63 as the bet type and the Lucky 63 calculator shows six rows. Enter the prices and results and type the stake per bet: “10p Lucky 63” is 10p per line and £6.30 in total. At £1 a line the same bet costs £63, and each way it is £126.

If you want to set a budget instead, press Total. £10 in total is about 16p a line, and on the example day it returns £21.09. Ticking each way adds a place line to every bet, 126 in all, and gives each horse its own place terms. Six races often have different field sizes, so you may need a mix of 1/4 and 1/5 terms rather than one value for all six.

With six races involved, it helps to enter the horses in race order. The return is the same whichever order you use, but the numbered line-by-line list is much easier to match against a settlement when horse 1 ran first.

How far a Lucky 63 can travel

With the same six prices at 10p, the range of returns is huge.

One winner returns only its single: 25p for the 6/4 shot, £1.30 for the 12/1 shot. Against a £6.30 stake that is a small refund, not a result. The break-even price for a lone winner is 62/1.

Two winners return two singles and a double. The two shortest prices, 6/4 and 9/4, return £1.39. The two longest, 7/1 and 12/1, return £12.50, which nearly doubles the stake.

Three winners return three singles, three doubles and a treble. The three shortest return £7.34, the three longest £81.80. The example day, a spread of prices, returned £13.29.

Four, five or six winners is where the bet was always pointed. Four winners at the four shortest prices return £48.24. Five winners return £434.99. All six winning returns £6,091.21, almost a thousand times the stake.

That range is what the bet is for. A Lucky 63 is a way of having a small stake on six horses and keeping every possible route to a big return open. The price of that is that ordinary days, with two or three winners at modest odds, return modest amounts.

Where the money sits on the big day

It is worth opening the breakdown on the day all six win, just to see the shape of the bet. At 10p a line, the six singles return £3.63 and the fifteen doubles £50.90. The twenty trebles return £356.94, the fifteen four-folds £1,327.02 and the six five-folds £2,493.72. The single six-fold returns £1,859.00 on its own.

Read that from top to bottom and it tells you what a Lucky 63 is. The singles and doubles, 21 of the 63 lines, are there to soften the ordinary days. The four-folds and five-folds, 21 more lines, are where a very good day pays. The six-fold, one line out of sixty-three, is worth more than all the singles, doubles and trebles put together.

None of those big lines pay unless four or more horses win, which is why a Lucky 63 so often settles for a modest figure. The bet is not badly designed. It is built around an outcome that doesn’t happen often, with a cushion underneath for the days it doesn’t.

Stake sizes

Because each line scales with the stake, a Lucky 63 can be as small or as large as you like. On the example day, a 5p Lucky 63, £3.15 in total, returns £6.64. A 20p bet costs £12.60 and returns £26.57. A 50p bet costs £31.50 and returns £66.44. The profit and loss scale in exactly the same proportion, which is worth remembering: a bet that makes a small profit at 10p makes the same small profit, ten times bigger, at £1.

A quick check by hand

A Lucky bet can be settled in one sum when nothing unusual has happened. Add one to each winner’s decimal price, multiply those figures, take away one, and multiply by the line stake.

On the example day the winners are 2.5, 3.25 and 8 in decimals. Plus one gives 3.5, 4.25 and 9. Their product is 133.875. Take away one and multiply by 10p, and you have £13.29, the slip’s figure exactly.

It is worth knowing because a 63-line settlement is hard to check line by line. If the one-sum figure matches the bookmaker’s total, the settlement is right. If it doesn’t, look for a Rule 4 deduction or a dead heat, which the quick sum can’t handle and the calculator can.

Each way Lucky 63s

An each way Lucky 63 costs £12.60 at 10p: 63 win lines and 63 place lines. With 1/5 terms on every race, the example day returns £15.10, the £13.29 from the win side and a little under £2 from the place lines on the three winners.

The place side is where six horses make a real difference. If the three beaten horses had all placed instead, every place line would pay, and the bet would return £76.75. If all six had placed without any of them winning, the place lines alone would return £63.46 from £12.60.

That is the argument for each way on a Lucky 63: with six races in the bet, a day of horses running well without winning is a real possibility, and the place lines pay out on it. On short prices in small fields the argument is weak, because the place prices are tiny. On bigger prices in big-field handicaps, it can be the whole bet.

Non-runners, Rule 4 and dead heats

Each horse sits in 32 of the 63 lines, so anything that changes one horse changes half the bet.

A non-runner refunds its single and is settled out of every other line it is in. If the 3/1 horse had been withdrawn instead of beaten, its lines would survive on the remaining winners, and the bet would return £26.68 instead of £13.29.

Rule 4 cuts one horse’s winnings wherever it appears. A 25p deduction on the 6/4 winner reduces the return to £11.85.

A dead heat divides the stake on every line containing that horse. If the 6/4 horse had dead heated for first with one other, the bet would return £8.51.

Lucky 63 or Heinz?

The Heinz is the same six horses without the singles: 57 bets, £5.70 at 10p. On the example day it would return £11.91, the Lucky 63’s figure less the £1.38 of singles. The singles cost 60p more and pay something on any day with a winner.

On five horses the same choice is the Lucky 31 or the Canadian. The guide to the Heinz and the big full-cover bets covers the whole family, including the Super Heinz and the Goliath, which go to seven and eight horses without singles.

Checking a settlement

In the Lucky 63 calculator, enter the prices you were paid at, which means the returned starting prices for an SP bet, and the results as declared. Then compare the calculator’s total with the bookmaker’s. If they match, you are done. If not, the summary by size tells you where to look: a wrong count of paying singles or doubles means a result is wrong, and the right count with the wrong total means a price or a deduction is.

A Lucky 63 is often struck with a mix of prices: some taken in the morning, some left to SP because the market wasn’t up yet. Enter each horse at the price it was actually settled at. A morning price stands whatever happened to the market later, and an SP bet is paid at the returned starting price. Getting one of the six wrong is the easiest way for a settlement to look out when it isn’t.

With 63 lines, it is not worth reading the full list unless the summary points to a problem. When it does, the list shows the combined multiplier on every line, and a horse with the wrong price stands out in all 32 of the lines it sits in.