Trixie Bet Explained: How a Trixie Works and What Two Winners Pay

A Trixie is three horses in three separate races, combined in every way that needs more than one winner. Three horses make three possible pairs and one group of three, so the bet is three doubles and a treble. Four bets in total, each at the same stake.

That makes it the smallest of the full-cover bets and a good place to see how the whole family works. If you understand why a Trixie pays what it pays, the Yankee, the Heinz and the rest are the same idea with more horses.

What is a Trixie bet?

Call the three horses A, B and C. The doubles are AB, AC and BC. The treble is ABC. At £1 a line the bet costs £4; at £2 a line, £8; at 50p, £2.

The question to ask about any Trixie bet is simple: how many of the three do you expect to win? If the answer is three, a treble on its own is cheaper and pays the most. If the answer is “probably two, but I can’t say which two”, that is exactly the problem the Trixie solves. Whichever pair comes in, one of the doubles covers it.

What a Trixie can’t do is pay on one winner. There is no single in it. That is the difference between a Trixie and a Patent, which adds the three singles.

How does a Trixie bet work? A worked example

Take three horses at 6/4, 2/1 and 11/4, and £2 a line, so £8 staked. The calculator at the bottom of this page is loaded with the first two-winner case below.

One winner returns nothing. Every line needs two horses.

Two winners return one double. Which pair decides the size. If the 6/4 and 2/1 horses win, the double is £2 × 2.5 × 3.0 = £15. If it is the 6/4 and 11/4 horses, £18.75. The 2/1 and 11/4 pair pays £22.50. All three outcomes are a profit on the £8, which is not true at every set of prices, as a later section shows.

Three winners return all four lines. The three doubles come to £56.25 between them, and the treble adds another £56.25, so the total is £112.50.

It is worth noticing that the treble and the three doubles pay the same total here. That is a coincidence of these prices, not a rule, but it makes a point: the treble is a single line and the doubles are three, yet at mid-range prices the one line can be worth as much as the three together. That is the multiplying power of a treble, and it is why the third winner matters so much.

Trixie or treble or double?

The Trixie sits between two simpler bets, and comparing them with the same horses shows what it is for.

A £2 treble on the same three horses costs £2 and returns £56.25 if all three win. If one loses, it returns nothing. The Trixie costs four times as much and returns £112.50 when all three win, but it also returns £15 to £22.50 when only two do. You are paying £6 more for protection against one loser.

A double on the two horses you like best is the other alternative. £6 on the 2/1 and 11/4 horses, the same outlay as three-quarters of the Trixie, returns £67.50 if both win. It returns nothing if either loses, and it ignores the third horse completely. If you are sure about two horses and doubtful about the third, the double is the more honest bet. If you rate all three about the same and can’t split them, the Trixie is.

This is the judgement at the centre of every full-cover bet. More lines buy more ways to be partly right, and each line costs the same stake.

The Trixie against the Patent on the same horses

Adding the three singles turns a Trixie into a Patent, and running the same horses through both shows exactly what the singles are worth.

At £2 a line, the Patent on the 6/4, 2/1 and 11/4 horses is seven bets and costs £14, against £8 for the Trixie. With only the 6/4 horse winning, the Patent returns £5 from its single. The Trixie returns nothing. Neither is a good result: the Patent loses £9 and the Trixie loses £8.

With the 6/4 and 2/1 horses winning, the Patent returns £26, the £15 double plus two singles worth £5 and £6. The Trixie returns £15. So the Patent is £12 up and the Trixie £7 up, and the singles have earned their £6.

The pattern generalises. The singles cost the same whatever happens, and they only pay their way on days with winners at reasonable prices. On a day with one winner at a short price, they soften the loss a little. On a day with no winners, they are simply extra stake lost. A Trixie bet keeps the cost down by leaving them out, and accepts that one winner is not enough.

When a Trixie loses money on two winners

Two winners don’t always mean a profit. The Trixie costs four line stakes, and a double has to return more than that to break even.

Take three odds-on horses at 4/6 each, £1 a line, so £4 staked. Two of them win and one loses. The double pays £1 × 1.67 × 1.67, about £2.78. That is a loss of £1.22 on a day when two of your three horses won. The shorter the prices, the more the third winner is needed.

At the other end, two winners at bigger prices pay far more than the stake. With horses at 5/1, 8/1 and 3/1 and the 5/1 and 8/1 shots winning, the £2 double returns £108 from the £8 Trixie. A single double carries the whole bet.

So a Trixie bet suits horses at middling or bigger prices, where any one double covers the cost of the four lines. On three short-priced favourites it is an expensive way to back them.

Each way Trixies

Each way doubles the bet to eight lines: four on the win and four on the place. At £1 each way, the Trixie costs £8.

Each place line pays at the place prices of the horses in it, and a horse that won is treated as placed. Using the three horses above at 1/5 terms, £1 each way, if all three are placed but none wins, the four place lines return £8.83. That is £8.83 back from £8, on a day with no winners at all.

The same total comes back if one horse wins and the other two place. The win lines then pay nothing, because a win double needs two winners, and the place lines are identical to the no-winner case. It is a small but useful illustration of how each way multiples work: the place side follows the placed horses, and the win side needs the winners to line up in pairs.

The terms usually differ between your three races, so check each one. The each way guide covers how the terms are set.

Non-runners and Rule 4 in a Trixie

A non-runner changes the bet rather than ending it. Every line with the withdrawn horse is settled as if the horse weren’t in it. The two doubles that included it become singles on the other horses. The treble becomes a double.

With the 6/4 and 2/1 horses winning and the 11/4 horse withdrawn, the £2 Trixie returns £41. The original double on the two winners pays £15. The two doubles with the non-runner have turned into singles, paying £5 and £6. And the treble has become a second copy of the winning double, another £15. Compare that with £15 when the third horse ran and lost.

Rule 4 applies to one horse in one race, so it touches the three lines that horse appears in. With a 20p deduction on the 2/1 winner, its price comes down to 1.6 to 1, and the double on the 6/4 and 2/1 pair returns £13 instead of £15. The Rule 4 page has the deductions, and the bet calculator applies them to the right lines if you set them on that horse’s row.

Settling a Trixie by hand

Four lines are few enough to settle in your head once the prices are in decimals. The 6/4 horse is 2.5, the 2/1 horse 3.0 and the 11/4 horse 3.75. A loser counts as zero, a non-runner as one.

Multiply each pair for the doubles, the three together for the treble, and multiply each result by the line stake. Any line with a zero in it is dead. With the 11/4 horse beaten, only the first pair survives: 2.5 × 3.0 is 7.5, and 7.5 times the £2 stake is the £15 on the slip.

If a settlement looks wrong, the first things to check are the prices used, a possible Rule 4 on one of the horses, and whether a dead heat was declared in one of the races. Those three are the usual places to look.

A note on picking three horses

Because a Trixie leans so heavily on pairs, it rewards three horses whose chances are roughly independent of each other. Three runners on the same card, from the same yard, on ground that suits all three, will tend to have good and bad days together. That makes the bet behave more like a treble than a Trixie.

Three horses in different kinds of races, at different courses or on different going, give the doubles a fairer chance of covering you when one of them runs badly. It is not a guarantee of anything, but it is the reason the bet exists: to be partly right when you can’t be completely right.