Heinz Bet Explained: 57 Bets, and Its Bigger Relatives up to a Goliath

Once you have more than four horses, the full-cover bets get big quickly. A Heinz bet takes six horses and backs every double, treble, four-fold, five-fold and six-fold they can make. That is 57 bets. Add a seventh horse and it is 120. Add an eighth and it is 247.

These bets are the top of a ladder that starts with the Trixie and the Yankee, and they follow exactly the same rule. This page covers the whole upper half of it: the Canadian, the Lucky 31, the Heinz, the Lucky 63, the Super Heinz and the Goliath.

What is in each bet

Every bet in this family is built the same way: take a number of horses and back every combination of two or more of them. The “Lucky” versions add a single on each horse.

“Bigger folds” is every four-fold and upwards. In a Heinz that is 15 four-folds, 6 five-folds and the six-fold. In a Goliath it runs 70, 56, 28, 8 and 1, from the four-folds to the single eight-fold.

The counts come straight from the number of ways to choose horses. Six horses can be paired 15 ways, grouped in threes 20 ways, and so on. You never need to remember them, only the principle: each extra horse roughly doubles the size of the bet.

The rule that explains the whole family

Here is the most useful thing to know about these bets, and it is easy to miss. With the same winners, every bet in the family without singles returns exactly the same amount.

Take horses at 2/1, 5/2, 3/1, 4/1, 9/2, 5/1, 6/4 and 7/4, 10p a line, and suppose the first three win and the rest lose. A Canadian on the first five horses returns £7.85. A Heinz on the first six returns £7.85. A Super Heinz on seven and a Goliath on all eight both return £7.85.

The reason is simple once you see it. The only lines that pay are the ones made entirely of winners: the three doubles among the three winners and the treble of all three. Every other line has a loser in it. Adding more horses to the bet adds more lines, but every one of those new lines contains at least one of the extra horses, and if those horses lose, the lines are dead.

What changes is the cost. The Canadian costs £2.60, the Heinz £5.70, the Super Heinz £12 and the Goliath £24.70. For the same three winners, you have paid anything from £2.60 to £24.70 to collect the same £7.85.

So the extra horses in a bigger bet are only worth having if they win. Every horse you add should be one you would genuinely expect to contribute, not one added to fill a bigger bet.

What a Heinz bet pays with two to six winners

Using the first six of those horses at 10p a line, the Heinz costs £5.70.

Two winners return one double. With the 2/1 and 5/2 shots, that is £1.05, a heavy loss. Three winners return £7.85, a small profit. Four winners return £52.35, and five return £348.80. If all six win, the return is £2,454.20.

The pattern is steep. The step from three winners to four multiplies the return by nearly seven, and from four to five by nearly seven again. The Heinz bet is built for the days when most of your horses come in, and it does very little on the days when only two or three do.

The same horses in a Lucky 63, at £6.30, return a little more at every level because of the singles: £1.70 with two winners, £8.90 with three, £53.90 with four. With one winner the Lucky 63 returns that horse’s single, which at 10p on the 5/1 shot is 60p. A lone winner would have to be 62/1 or bigger to get the whole £6.30 back.

Canadian and Lucky 31: the five-horse bets

The Canadian, also called the Super Yankee, is five horses and 26 bets. It is to the Yankee what the Yankee is to the Trixie: one more horse, every combination. At 10p a line it costs £2.60, a little less than a 25p Yankee at £2.75, which is a fair comparison: the Canadian spreads a similar outlay across one more horse and many more lines, each carrying a smaller stake.

On the first five horses above, two winners return £1.05, three return £7.85 and four return £52.35. All five winning return £348.80.

The Lucky 31 adds five singles, 31 bets, £3.10 at 10p. The singles lift each return a little: £1.70 on two winners, £8.90 on three. With one winner at 9/2, the Lucky 31 returns 55p.

Five horses is where these bets start to need more than a good day. Two winners from five would feel like a decent afternoon, and it loses most of the stake in both bets.

Super Heinz and Goliath

The Super Heinz is seven horses and 120 bets. The Goliath is eight horses and 247 bets. At 10p a line they cost £12 and £24.70.

Their returns follow the same rule as the rest: with the same two, three or four winners they pay exactly what the Heinz and the Canadian pay, because the extra lines all contain the extra horses. The difference shows only when those extra horses also win. All seven winning in the Super Heinz returns £8,596.45 at these prices, and all eight in the Goliath £32,244.80.

Those figures are real, and so is the difficulty of getting there. Eight winners out of eight is a very long shot even with short-priced horses. As an aside, the numbers in a Goliath are the same as the number of ways to choose from eight things, which is why the counts in the table rise and then fall again symmetrically: 28, 56, 70, 56, 28, 8, 1. The bet is simply every non-trivial subset of your eight horses.

A short cut for settling the big bets

Settling 57 lines by hand sounds like an evening’s work, but there is a neat short cut, and it works for every bet on this page when nothing unusual has happened.

Take the decimal odds of each winner, add one to each, and multiply those numbers together. Take one away. For a Lucky bet, which includes the singles, that is the return per unit of line stake. For the versions without singles, also take away the decimal odds of each winner, which removes the singles you didn’t bet.

Check it on the three-winner Heinz from above. The winners are at 3.0, 3.5 and 4.0. Adding one gives 4, 4.5 and 5, and their product is 90. Take one away and you have 89, so a 10p Lucky 63 returns £8.90. Take away 3 + 3.5 + 4 as well and you have 78.5, so the 10p Heinz returns £7.85. Both match the figures earlier on the page, and both match the calculator.

The short cut works because every paying line is some group of the winners, and multiplying the “one plus odds” figures together produces every such group exactly once. Losers drop out on their own, because no line containing them pays. It breaks down with each way, dead heats or Rule 4, where each horse has more than one value, and there the calculator is the easier route.

Each way, non-runners and Rule 4

Each way doubles every bet here. An each way Heinz is 114 bets, and at 10p each way it costs £11.40. An each way Goliath is 494 bets. The place lines pay whenever every horse in the line is placed, so an each way Heinz bet can return a good deal on a day of placed horses, but the cost of the place lines is large, and the place prices are a fraction of the win prices.

A non-runner makes these bets smaller rather than killing them. Every line with the withdrawn horse is settled without it, so a six-fold becomes a five-fold, a double becomes a single, and so on. Several lines can end up identical after a withdrawal, and each is paid. A Rule 4 deduction on one horse cuts its price in every line it appears in, which in a Heinz is 31 of the 57.

The bet calculator settles all six bets here, with each way, non-runners, Rule 4 and dead heats, and the calculator at the foot of this page is set up with the three-winner Heinz from above.

When the big bets make sense

The stake per line is the lever that makes these bets affordable. At 5p a line, a Heinz costs £2.85 and a Goliath £12.35. At 20p they cost £11.40 and £49.40. The returns scale in exactly the same proportion, so the question is never whether the bet is cheap at a small stake, but whether the pattern of returns suits the horses you have.

The honest case for these bets is small stakes and genuine confidence in most of the horses. A 10p Heinz costs less than a £1 Patent and gives six races of interest, with a large return if four or more win.

The case against is everything above. The bookmaker’s margin is in every line, and the returns are concentrated at the top: on any day with two winners these bets lose most of the stake, and with three they barely cover it. If you would be pleased with two or three winners from six, a Patent or Trixie on your three strongest horses will usually return more for much less.

For the four-horse bets that start the ladder, see the Yankee and the Lucky 15.