Patent Bet Explained: Seven Bets on Three Horses, and What One Pays

A Patent bet is three horses in three races, backed every way there is. Each horse gets a single, each pair gets a double, and all three get a treble. Three plus three plus one is seven bets, all at the same stake.

The singles are the point of the bet. They mean one winner always returns something, which the Trixie, the same bet without them, can’t promise. With the Patent bet explained properly, though, the singles turn out to be more of a cushion than a safety net, and the prices you are backing decide how much of a cushion they are.

What is a Patent bet, line by line

Label the horses A, B and C. The singles are A, B and C. The doubles are AB, AC and BC. The treble is ABC.

At £1 a line the bet is seven £1 bets and costs £7. At 50p a line it is £3.50, and at £2 it is £14. It is easy to think of it as a £1 bet, because the slip only asks for the line stake, so it is worth writing the total down before you hand it over.

Each horse appears in four of the seven lines: its own single, two doubles and the treble. When one horse loses, those four lines go and three survive, the other two horses’ singles and the double between them. That is why a Patent with one loser still has a real chance of a profit, and a Trixie with one loser has only a single line left to carry it.

A Patent is also the three-horse member of the “Lucky” family: the Lucky 15 is the same structure on four horses, and the Lucky 31 and Lucky 63 on five and six. They all share the same rule of thumb. Every horse gets a single, and every combination above that gets a multiple.

What a Patent bet pays: a worked example

Take three horses at 5/1, 4/1 and 7/2, £1 a line, so £7 staked. The calculator below the page is set up with the two-winner case.

One winner. Only its single pays. If it is the 5/1 horse, £6 comes back, £1 short of the stake. If it is the 7/2 horse, £4.50, a loss of £2.50. At £1 a line, a lone winner has to be 6/1 or bigger to get all £7 back.

Two winners. Two singles and one double pay. With the 5/1 and 4/1 horses winning, the singles return £6 and £5, and the double £1 × 6 × 5 = £30. That is £41 in total, a profit of £34.

Three winners. Every line pays. The singles come to £15.50, the doubles to £79.50 and the treble to £135, which makes £230 from a £7 stake.

Look at where the money comes from in each case. On one winner, it is all singles. On two, the double is nearly three-quarters of the return. On three, the treble alone is well over half. The singles are the bet’s floor, and the multiples are its ceiling.

Patent bet or Trixie?

The same three horses in a Trixie cost £4 instead of £7, and the Trixie returns everything the Patent does except the singles. With three winners that means £214.50 against £230, the £15.50 difference being the singles. With two, it is £30 against £41. With one, it is nothing against £4.50 or £6.

So the question is whether £3 of singles is worth having. On a day with one winner at 4/1 or 5/1, they turn a total loss into a small one. On a day with two or three winners, they add a modest amount on top of a good return. On a day with no winners, they are £3 more lost.

There is no right answer in general, and it depends on your horses. If you expect all three to run well, the Trixie is the cheaper way to back that view. If you think one winner is the likeliest good outcome, the Patent’s singles are doing real work. The Trixie page runs through the same comparison from the other side.

When the singles don’t save you

The singles only soften a loss if the prices are big enough to matter.

Put three shorter-priced horses in a £1 Patent, at evens, 6/4 and 5/4. If only the evens shot wins, the single returns £2 from a £7 stake, a loss of £5. Even two winners, the evens and 6/4 horses, return only £9.50: the singles pay £2 and £2.50, and the double £5. A £2.50 profit on a day when two of three horses won is a thin reward for a seven-line bet.

That is not a flaw in the Patent bet. It is what happens to any full-cover bet built from short prices, because the lines multiply small numbers. It does mean the bet is a better fit for horses somewhere around 3/1 to 8/1 than for a set of favourites. At the shorter end, three win singles on the same horses would say the same thing with less of the stake tied up in combinations.

Each way Patents

Each way doubles the Patent to fourteen lines, seven on the win and seven on the place. At 50p each way it costs £7.

The place lines are settled at each horse’s place price, and a winner counts as placed. With the same three horses at 1/5 terms, 50p each way, suppose the 5/1 horse wins, the 4/1 horse places and the 7/2 horse is unplaced. The win side pays the one single. The place side pays two singles and the double. The total is £6.70, just under the £7 stake.

If all three are placed and none wins, the place lines alone return £10.84, a profit on a day without a winner. That is the case each way is designed for, and it is only available because every place line survives when every horse is placed.

The terms in your three races may well differ, a quarter in one and a fifth in another, and each is applied to its own horse. The each way guide explains how they are decided.

Non-runners in a Patent

A withdrawn horse is less damaging than a beaten one. Its single hands the stake back. Every double that included it is settled as a single on its partner. The treble becomes a double on the remaining two.

Using the same prices with the 5/1 and 7/2 horses winning and the 4/1 horse withdrawn, the £1 Patent returns £76. The singles return £6, £1 and £4.50. The doubles return £6, £27 and £4.50, because the two with the non-runner are now singles again. And the treble is a second £27 double. Had the 4/1 horse run and lost instead, the bet would have returned £37.50: the two singles and the one double between the winners.

The same logic applies to a Rule 4 deduction on one horse: it changes that horse’s price in the four lines it appears in, and nowhere else. The Patent calculator handles both.

Settling a Patent by hand

Seven lines is a manageable sum. Put each price into decimals first: 5/1 is 6.0, 4/1 is 5.0 and 7/2 is 4.5. Give a loser a value of zero and a non-runner a value of one.

Then work through the singles, the doubles and the treble. Each single is the stake times one value. Each double is the stake times two values multiplied, and the treble the stake times all three. Any line containing a zero is dead. Add up whatever is left.

With a Rule 4 deduction on one horse, adjust that horse’s value first and use the adjusted figure in every line. A 15p deduction on the 5/1 winner turns 6.0 into 5.25, because only the winnings are cut: five times 0.85 is 4.25, plus the stake. With the 5/1 and 4/1 horses winning and the 7/2 horse losing, the Patent then returns £36.50 instead of £41. The same method checks any full-cover bet, and a Patent is the easiest one to practise it on.

Placing a Patent

In a betting shop, list the three horses with the meeting and time of each race, write “Patent” as the bet type and put the line stake, such as “£1 Patent” or “50p E/W Patent”. The cashier works out the total, and it is worth checking that the figure on your receipt is seven times your line stake, or fourteen times each way.

Online, the bet slip lists the multiples it will accept for the selections you have added, so look for the Patent among them once all three horses are on the slip. The stake box there is also per line. Some slips show the total underneath, some don’t, so look before you confirm.

The three horses must be in different races. You can’t combine two runners from the same race in any multiple, because they can’t both win it.

One Patent or three singles?

Here is a comparison worth making once. Spend the same £7 on three win singles of about £2.33 each. With the 5/1 and 4/1 horses winning and the 7/2 horse losing, the singles return £25.67. The Patent returns £41.

The difference is the double. A Patent puts part of the stake into combinations, and when two horses win, the double between them is worth more than the extra single stakes would have been. When only one horse wins, the singles are better, because they had more money on the winner. Neither bet is smarter than the other. They are two different answers to how many of the three you expect to win.