Lucky 15 Explained: What It Is and How the Bet Works, Win or Each Way

What is a Lucky 15? It is four horses in four races, backed in every combination at once. That comes to 15 bets: each horse on its own, every pair, every group of three, and all four together. It is the bet a lot of people pick when they have four horses on a Saturday and can’t decide which to leave out.

The name is simple arithmetic. There are 4 singles, 6 doubles, 4 trebles and 1 four-fold, and 4 + 6 + 4 + 1 = 15. The “lucky” is the singles: they make sure one winner is never a total loss.

That is the Lucky 15 explained in two sentences. The rest of this page is about what it means in practice: how the bet is settled, what it pays with one, two, three or four winners, and when the extra cost of the singles is worth it.

What is a Lucky 15? The fifteen bets

Call the horses A, B, C and D. The singles are A, B, C and D. The doubles are AB, AC, AD, BC, BD and CD. The trebles are ABC, ABD, ACD and BCD. The four-fold is ABCD.

Each bet is settled on its own at the same stake. So a £1 Lucky 15 is fifteen £1 bets and costs £15, and a 50p Lucky 15 costs £7.50. The single and the four-fold are the same size stake, which is why the four-fold can return so much. It is a £1 bet on four prices multiplied together.

Every horse sits in eight of the fifteen bets: its own single, three doubles, three trebles and the four-fold. When one horse loses, those eight bets go with it and seven survive, but only three of those seven are bets that don’t need a second winner.

How a Lucky 15 works: one winner to four

This is where the bet is easiest to understand. Take four horses at 3/1, 4/1, 5/1 and 6/1, £1 a line, so £15 staked.

One winner. Only its single pays. If it is the 6/1 shot, £7 comes back and you are £8 down. A single winner is a partial refund, not a good day, unless the price is big. At £1 a line, a lone winner has to be 14/1 or longer to get the whole £15 back.

Two winners. Two singles and a double pay. With the 3/1 and 4/1 horses winning, the singles return £4 and £5 and the double £20: £29 in all, £14 profit. Two winners is where the bet usually turns a profit, and the bigger the prices, the bigger the double.

Three winners. Three singles, three doubles and a treble pay. With the 3/1, 4/1 and 5/1 horses winning, that is £209. The treble alone is £120.

Four winners. Every line pays, and the four-fold does the heavy lifting. At these prices the total is £1,679, of which £840 is the four-fold.

The shape is the point. The bet is cheap insurance at the bottom and a long shot at the top. The Lucky 15 calculator will settle your own four horses at your own prices, including non-runners and each way.

How a Lucky 15 is settled

When the bet is settled, the bookmaker works through the fifteen bets one at a time and adds up the winners. There is no special formula for the bet as a whole. Each line is a normal single, double, treble or four-fold at your line stake.

The settlement usually shows a total and sometimes the lines. To check one, start with the singles, which are the easy part: stake times decimal odds for each winner. Then the doubles, which are stake times the two decimal prices multiplied. Then the trebles and the four-fold the same way. If a horse was a non-runner, count it at 1.0 wherever it appears. If there was a Rule 4 deduction, use the reduced price for that horse in every line.

It is a lot of arithmetic for fifteen lines, and more for thirty each way, which is exactly what the calculator is for. But it is worth doing once by hand, because it makes the answer to “what is a Lucky 15?” concrete. It is fifteen small bets that happen to share four horses, and nothing more mysterious than that.

A final point on how the bet behaves: it rewards consistency across four races more than one big winner. A day of two 4/1 winners pays much better than a day with one 16/1 winner, even though the 16/1 shot looks like the better result. That is the multiples doing their work, and it is the thing to understand before choosing it over a set of singles.

Lucky 15 explained against the Yankee and the Patent

The bet sits in a family of full-cover bets, and it helps to see where.

A Yankee is a Lucky 15 without the singles: 11 bets, £11 at £1 a line. With three winners at the prices above, the Yankee returns £194 against the Lucky 15’s £209. The £15 difference is the three winning singles, and they cost £4. With one winner, the Yankee returns nothing at all.

A Patent is the same idea on three horses: three singles, three doubles and a treble, seven bets. Here is the comparison worth knowing: with three winners and the fourth horse losing, the Lucky 15 returns exactly what a Patent on those three horses would, £209. Every line involving the loser is dead, and what is left is a Patent. You paid £15 for it instead of £7.

That is not a reason to avoid the bet. It is the price of having the fourth horse in the bet on the days it wins. It is a reason to be honest about the fourth horse. If you are adding it to make the numbers up, the Patent on your three real fancies is the cheaper bet.

How to back a Lucky 15 each way

Each way doubles the bet to 30 lines: a win line and a place line for each of the fifteen combinations. At 50p a line, that costs £15.

The place lines are why many people take the bet each way. Using the same four prices at 1/5 terms, 50p each way, three horses placed without a winner returns £10.42. That is a loss, but a small one, on a day a win-only Lucky 15 returns nothing. One winner at 3/1 with two placed horses returns £12.42.

The trade is plain: each way halves your stake per line for the same outlay, so on a day with several winners you get back much less than the win-only bet would have paid. Each way suits four horses at decent prices in races with good place terms. It suits four short-priced horses in small fields badly, because the place prices on short horses are tiny. The each way guide goes into when the place half earns its keep.

The terms usually differ between the four races, so an each way settlement often mixes 1/4 and 1/5 place prices. That is normal, and it is the first thing to check if an each way Lucky 15 comes back lower than you expected.

Choosing four horses

There is no formula for picking the four, but the bet’s structure does suggest a few habits.

Four horses at roughly similar prices suit it best. If one is 1/2 and three are 12/1, the favourite’s single pays almost nothing, and most of the value sits in combinations that need the outsiders. Four horses you rate about equally, somewhere between 2/1 and 8/1, give every line a fair chance to contribute.

Spread across races that don’t depend on each other. Four horses from one trainer at one meeting on ground that suits them all will tend to win or lose together. That makes the bet more of an all-or-nothing wager than its structure intends.

And decide the stake from the total, not the line. Fifteen lines at £1 is £15 every time, and each way is £30. It is easy to think of a “£1 Lucky 15” as a pound bet.

Some people build a Lucky 15 from four races on one card, others from four different meetings. Either works, as long as each horse is in a different race. One card has the practical advantage that the bet is settled within an afternoon. If a whole card is what you want to follow, the tote’s Placepot is designed for exactly that, at a much smaller stake. Four meetings spread across the day have the advantage that one bad result on a single course, heavy going that suits none of your horses for example, can’t sink all four at once.

Lucky 15 or Lucky 31: when a fifth horse is tempting

A fifth fancy turns the Lucky 15 into a Lucky 31: five singles, ten doubles, ten trebles, five four-folds and a five-fold. At £1 a line that is £31 instead of £15, so the fifth horse more than doubles the outlay. Whether that is worth it depends almost entirely on the fifth horse winning.

Take the same four horses at 3/1, 4/1, 5/1 and 6/1 and add an 8/1 shot. On a day when the 3/1 and 4/1 horses win and nothing else does, the four-horse bet returns £29 for a £14 profit. The Lucky 31 returns exactly the same £29, because none of its extra lines contains two winners, and that is now a £2 loss. Three winners from the original four pay £209 either way: £194 profit on four horses, £178 on five.

The picture changes only when the 8/1 horse wins too. With the 3/1, 4/1 and 8/1 horses in, the Lucky 31 returns £299. With all five winning it returns £16,799 against £1,679 on the original four.

So the fifth horse is not a cheap extra. It is a second bet costing £16 that pays nothing unless it wins, and pays well only when it wins alongside the others. Add it when you would back it anyway, not to fill a space.

Non-runners, bonuses and the small print

That is the Lucky 15 explained on an ordinary day. Two things change it: a horse that doesn’t run, and the offers bookmakers attach to the bet.

A non-runner is less damaging than a loser. Its single hands the stake back, and every line containing it is settled as if the horse were not there: its doubles become singles on the other horse, its trebles become doubles, and the four-fold becomes a treble. In effect the bet turns into two Patents on the remaining three horses, plus your stake back on the non-runner’s single.

Many bookmakers attach offers to this bet: double or treble odds on the single if only one horse wins, or a percentage bonus when all four win. They vary from firm to firm, and they change. They are a real part of the return when they apply, so it is worth reading the terms where you bet. The calculator on this site settles the bet on its own terms and leaves those offers out.