The ITV 7

Nowadays, the ITV 7 is a free-to-play competition offered by ITV in partnership with Sky Bet, but has its origins in the previous incarnation of ITV Racing, shown as part of ‘World of Sport’ from the early Seventies onwards. Although no longer an accumulator in the traditional sense, the basic concept remains the same; viewers are required to predict the winners of all seven selected races to win a prize of up to £100,000. Of course, picking seven winners, especially on a competitive, televised card, is no mean feat and cumulative odds regularly run to tens, or even hundreds, of thousands to one.

The ITV 7 may be free to enter, but the huge number of entries often leads to multiple winners, who share the jackpot prize. Consequently, many punters supplement their promotional bet with a small-stakes accumulator, of the traditional type – that is, settled at starting price, early price or board price, at the discretion of the punter – so that, if they do strike it lucky, they are guaranteed a mammoth payday, regardless of the number of winning tickets in the ITV 7.

However, even so, punters still need to pay attention to the prices on offer from the bookmaker with whom they place their accumulator bet; betting at multiple odds means that a point, or half a point, here and there can quickly translate into a shortfall of hundreds of thousands of pounds in the final payout. Indeed, on Betfair Hurdle Day, 2019, odds comparison service Oddschecker calculated that the difference between the best and worst odds on offer for each of the winners of the ITV 7 races – although, individually, never more than a single point – translated into a deficit of over £375,000 on a 7-fold accumulator to a £1 stake.

Lucky 15 Bet

A lucky 15 consists of 15 bets based on four selections. The combination of bets is: 4 singles, 6 doubles, 4 trebles, and 1 four-fold. A unique feature of lucky 15 bets is that if one selection wins a consolation return is paid to treble the odds, and if all four win there is a bonus added to winnings. A Lucky 15 bet is essentially like a yankee but with the additional singles bets added into the equation. The bet involves spreading your stake over a number of bets which could be perceived to be a negative, but the plus side of that is that you have more combinations of bet working for you.

Yankee Bet

With yankee bets we really start ramping up the the number of different bets contained within this particular multiple bet. Yankees consist of 11 bets in total across four selections (6 doubles, 4 trebles and a four-fold accumulator) so there is a bit of everything going on. Due to the number of total bets, the stake is spread out across all 11 bets. Consequently this is a type of bet better suited to speculative selections, as one of them losing isn’t the be all and end all (you’d still win 4 of 11 bets), unlike with a straight forward accumulator bet. Of course there is a trade off in how much you can win in total though, since your bet is spread relatively thinly when compared to a 4 fold acca.