Yankee Bet Explained: 11 Bets on Four Horses and What They Pay

A Yankee bet takes four horses running in four different races and backs every multiple they can make. There are six ways to pair four horses, four ways to pick three of them, and one way to take all four, so the bet is six doubles, four trebles and a four-fold. Eleven bets at the same stake.

There are no singles in it. That one fact decides almost everything about how a Yankee bet behaves: it does nothing for you on a day with a single winner, and it does a lot on a day with three or four.

What is a Yankee bet, line by line

Label the horses A, B, C and D in the order you write them on the slip.

The six pairs give the doubles: AB, AC, AD, BC, BD and CD. The trebles are ABC, ABD, ACD and BCD. The four-fold is ABCD.

Each of those is an ordinary multiple at your line stake. So a £1 Yankee is eleven separate £1 bets and costs £11. A 20p Yankee costs £2.20, and £2 a line costs £22.

Each horse appears in seven of the eleven lines: three doubles, three trebles and the four-fold. Lose one horse and those seven go, leaving three doubles and one treble on the other three horses. That leftover is exactly a Trixie, which is a useful way to think about a Yankee with one loser.

How a Yankee bet pays: two, three and four winners

Here is a £1 Yankee on horses at 7/4, 5/2, 3/1 and 9/2. It costs £11. The calculator below the page is loaded with the three-winner case, so you can change any of the results and watch the lines settle.

One winner returns nothing. There is no line in the bet that one horse can win on its own.

Two winners return one double. Which two matters a great deal. If the 7/4 and 5/2 shots win, the double pays £1 × 2.75 × 3.5 = £9.63, and you are £1.37 down on the day despite two winners. If it is the 5/2 and 9/2 shots, the double pays £19.25, a profit of £8.25. Two short-priced winners in a Yankee are often a small loss, and it is worth knowing that before you pick four favourites.

Three winners return three doubles and a treble. With the 7/4, 5/2 and 3/1 horses winning, that comes to £73.13. The treble alone is £38.50.

Four winners return all eleven lines. At these prices the total is £531.69, and a little over £211 of that is the four-fold.

The step from two winners to three is where the bet changes character. Two winners buy one line; three buy four lines, including a treble. That is why a Yankee suits four horses you think have real chances, rather than four you like the look of.

The line stake is yours to choose, and it scales every figure on this page in proportion. At 20p a line the bet costs £2.20, the two-winner double on the 5/2 and 9/2 shots returns £3.85, and all four winning returns £106.34. Small stakes don’t change the shape of the bet, only its size, which makes a 20p Yankee a cheap way to see how the bet behaves before putting more on it.

The Yankee bet and its neighbours

It helps to see the Yankee in its family.

The Lucky 15 is a Yankee plus four singles: 15 bets, £15 at £1 a line. Everything the Yankee returns, the Lucky 15 returns too. The only difference is the singles, which pay whenever a horse wins and cost £4 extra. On the two-winner day above with the 7/4 and 5/2 shots, the Lucky 15 would add £2.75 and £3.50 from the singles, turning a £1.37 loss into a small profit, but it also cost £4 more to begin with.

A Trixie is the three-horse version: three doubles and a treble. A Yankee is, in a sense, four Trixies layered together with a four-fold on top.

The Super Yankee is the five-horse version, better known as a Canadian: 26 bets. And so on up the ladder, through the Heinz on six horses to the Goliath on eight, all covered on the Heinz page. Each step adds a horse and roughly doubles the number of lines.

Backing a Yankee each way

Each way turns the eleven bets into 22: a win line and a place line for each combination. A 50p each way Yankee costs £11, the same as a £1 win Yankee.

Using the same four horses at 1/5 place terms, 50p each way, take a day when the 7/4 and 5/2 shots win, the 3/1 shot places and the 9/2 horse runs unplaced. The win lines pay one double. The place lines pay three doubles and a treble, because a winner also counts as placed. Together they return £9.73 from £11.

That is a useful figure to sit with. Two winners and a placed horse, and the bet still lost money, because the prices were short and the place fraction small. Each way on a Yankee does its job when the horses are bigger prices in races with generous terms. On short-priced horses, the place lines add cost faster than they add return. The each way guide explains how the terms are set.

Non-runners and Rule 4 in a Yankee

A non-runner doesn’t sink a Yankee, but it changes its shape. Every line with the missing horse is settled as though that horse had never been included. Its doubles become singles on the partner horse, its trebles become doubles, and the four-fold becomes a treble.

With the 7/4 and 5/2 horses winning, the 3/1 shot withdrawn and the 9/2 horse losing, a £1 Yankee returns £25.50. Compare that with the £9.63 when the 3/1 horse ran and lost. The non-runner’s lines turned into extra singles and doubles on the two winners, which is a much better outcome than a loss.

Rule 4 works on a single horse, so it touches only the seven lines that horse is in. If a late withdrawal in one of your four races triggers a deduction, the reduced price for your horse in that race carries through each of its doubles, trebles and the four-fold. Set it on the right row in the bet calculator and it will apply it everywhere. The Rule 4 page has the table of deductions.

When a Yankee is the right bet

A Yankee bet is made for a particular kind of day. You have four horses, you rate all of them, and you expect at least two to win. You want a return if you get two or three right, and a large one if you get all four, and you are prepared to lose the whole stake if only one comes in.

It is less suited to a set of short-priced favourites, for the reason shown above: two short winners barely return the stake. It is also a poor fit when one horse is a strong fancy and the other three are there to fill the slip. In that case the lines without your main horse are carrying three selections you don’t really believe in, and a single on the strong fancy plus a smaller Trixie on the others says more clearly what you think.

As an aside, nothing about a Yankee is specific to racing. The same eleven lines can be built from four selections in any four separate events, a football match, a tennis match and two races, say, and the arithmetic is identical.

How the prices change a Yankee

The same bet behaves very differently depending on the prices, and two extreme cases show the range.

Take four horses at evens, £1 a line. Two winners return one double at 2.0 × 2.0, which is £4 from £11. Three winners return three doubles and a treble, £20 in all. Even four winners from four return only £72. A Yankee on short-priced horses needs everything to go right just to make a modest profit, because each extra winner multiplies a small number by another small number.

Now take four horses at 6/1. Two winners return a single double at 7.0 × 7.0, which is £49, more than four times the stake. Four winners return £4,067.

Neither case says which bet to place. They say what kind of horses the bet was designed for. A Yankee turns middling and bigger prices into large returns when two or more come in, and it turns short prices into small ones. If your four horses are all around evens, a set of singles or a double on the two you like most will usually say the same thing more cheaply.

Settling a Yankee by hand

A Yankee is short enough to settle with a pencil, which is the best way to trust a settlement. Convert each price to decimals: 7/4 is 2.75, 5/2 is 3.5, 3/1 is 4.0 and 9/2 is 5.5. Give every loser a value of zero and every non-runner a value of one. Then work down the list.

Each double is the stake times two values multiplied. Each treble is the stake times three. The four-fold is the stake times all four. Any line with a zero in it returns nothing, which is why so many lines vanish when a horse loses. Add up what is left and you have the return.

On the three-winner day, the three doubles among the winners come to £9.63, £11.00 and £14.00, and the treble to £38.50. Add them and you have £73.13, the figure the calculator shows. If a bookmaker’s settlement disagrees with yours, the usual cause is a price: check that the settlement used the price you took, not the starting price, and that any Rule 4 was applied to the right horse.