What is a Yankee Bet? Yankee bets: Working out your odds and potential winnings

If you’re relatively new to sports betting, you may have heard or seen the term ‘Yankee bet’ without having a clear idea of what it is. You may also have some understanding of the term and decided that it sounds too complicated or risky to be worth pursuing any further. In fact, the Yankee Bet is a great way to increase your chances of winning a major payout, and is actually a way to safely cover yourself against some of your selections not working out, at least compared to other forms of multiple betting.

Why is it called a Yankee?

No-one is entirely sure how the Yankee Bet got its name, but it’s almost certainly nothing to do with betting on the New York Yankees! The story is that the name comes from the good fortune of an American G.I. stationed in the UK, who placed a small bet but then won big, thanks to the mechanics of the multiple roll-overs involved. Whether that is true or not, a Yankee is now a formalized system bet that can potentially lead to bigger winnings than any one single or combination bet.

What makes up a Yankee?

A Yankee involves eleven different combination bets on four separate sporting events. These are six doubles, four trebles and one fourfold bet. While there will be clear odds for your chosen outcome on each event, working out the overall odds can be tricky. Most people use a Yankee bet calculator, a tool like this one: a betting calculator that will let you work out your profit margins, analyze the odds and try out different combinations.

A betting calculator is essential for a complex system bet such as a Yankee. Using it not only lets you see what your chances of winning are, it lets you compare odds in order to get the best prices. You can analyze different scenarios and adapt your bet accordingly.

What do I need to do?

A closer look at the Yankee lets us break down its constituent parts in order to make it more understandable. Initially you just need to choose four separate sporting events and make a prediction regarding the outcome of each. You can combine different sports or just stick to a series of games in one tournament, for example choosing the outcomes of four different NFL games based on the latest news and information. In practice once you’ve done this you can just choose to place your bet as a Yankee and wait to see what happens.

What are the other options?

A Yankee is one type of systems bet. Broadly speaking, if you bet on more than one event at one time you can either place a series of single bets, one multiple bet, or a system bet. If you keep them as separate single bets, the outcome of one bet has no bearing upon any of your other bets. If you choose a multiple, all of your predictions have to come off for you to win anything. So if you bet on four games and get one outcome wrong, you will lose everything.

With a systems bet such as a Yankee, one or more of your predictions can be wrong and you could still win something, though obviously not as much as if all of your predictions were correct. In the case of a Yankee, you bet on four events but only need two or more to come through for you to win something. This is because of the range of different combination bets involved.

What are the combinations?

The first line of a Yankee consists of six doubles. A double means that for you to win, you have to have correctly predicted the outcomes of two specified sporting events. Here, the six doubles cover every possible combination of four events in sets of two. The next line, made up of four trebles, is the same but in groups of three. Finally you have the fourfold bet, which is a bet that all four of your predictions are right.

There is also a version known as a Super Yankee, where you bet on five selected events. These are represented in 26 different combination bets: ten trebles, ten doubles, five four-folds and a five-fold.

While the potential payout from a Yankee isn’t as great as that from a straight multiple, the risk of losing everything is much less. It can seem complicated but it’s a great way to potentially maximize your winnings, while leaving a certain margin of error. Why not try it out today?