What Is a Yankee Bet? How It Works, With a Worked Example

A Yankee is one of the most popular multiple bets in horse racing, mostly because it strikes a nice balance: you get a big potential payout from a small stake, but you don't need all your selections to win to get some money back.

What a Yankee actually is

A Yankee is a bet on 4 selections, combined into 11 separate bets:

• 6 doubles (every possible pair of your 4 selections)
• 4 trebles (every possible group of 3)
• 1 fourfold accumulator (all 4 together)

That's 6 + 4 + 1 = 11 bets total. If you stake £1 per bet, a Yankee costs £11 total, not £4 - this catches people out more than anything else about it.

Why it's structured this way

The whole point of a Yankee is that you don't need a clean sweep to get a return. Because it includes every double and treble combination, you only need 2 of your 4 selections to win to get some money back (from the double that contains those two winners) - the other 9 bets can lose without wiping you out completely.

Compare that to a straight fourfold accumulator on the same 4 selections: one loser and the entire bet is dead. A Yankee spreads that risk across multiple combinations instead of asking everything to go right at once.

A worked example

Say you pick 4 horses, all at 3/1, in a £1 Yankee (£11 total stake).

If all 4 win:

• 6 doubles at 3/1 + 3/1 odds each pay 15/1 → 6 x £16 = £96
• 4 trebles pay 63/1 → 4 x £64 = £256
• 1 fourfold pays 255/1 → £256
• Total return: £608 from an £11 stake

If 3 of the 4 win:

• 3 of the doubles (both winners in the pair) pay out
• 1 of the trebles (all 3 winners) pays out
• The fourfold loses (needs all 4)
• You'd still walk away with a solid profit, even though a quarter of your selections lost

If only 2 of the 4 win:

• Just 1 double pays out (the one containing both winners)
• Everything else in the bet loses
• Depending on the odds, this can still be a small profit or a small loss - worth checking with a calculator before assuming either way

If 1 or 0 win:

• No combination has enough winners to trigger a payout - the bet loses in full

You can build out your own Yankee and see exactly what each outcome returns with our Multiples Calculator - enter your 4 selections' odds and it works out every combination for you.

A couple of things worth knowing

• Each-way Yankees exist too - same structure, but every one of the 11 bets is doubled into a win and place portion, so a £1 each-way Yankee costs £22, not £11.
• Rule 4 deductions apply per selection if a horse in any of your 4 legs is withdrawn - see our Rule 4 explainer for how the maths works.
• A Yankee is one of a family of similar bets - Trixie (3 selections, 4 bets), Canadian/Super Yankee (5 selections, 26 bets), and Heinz (6 selections, 57 bets) all follow the same logic, just with more or fewer selections.

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Want tips with the reasoning behind them, free? Join our free Telegram channel - or try the Multiples Calculator to work out your own Yankee, Trixie, or accumulator before you bet.