Table tennis betting tips 2026 — how to read a price and avoid paying the bookie twice

Updated October 2026

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Winnings in betting do not come from knowing the next winner. They come from the spread between the price the bookie offers and the probability you can defend, after the margin is taken out. That is the engine of a “value bet”, and it is the only honest reason to back one player over another on a table-tennis betting slip. Everything else — form, head-to-head, schedule, the sort of surface a paddle game happens to be played on — is the raw material a price is built from, not the price itself.

This guide is for UK punters who want a working method, not a tip sheet. It walks the choices: live or pre-match, outright or handicap, a single price or a same-game multi. It explains the costs an offer hides in its small print, from a £10 bonus that needs £500 of qualifying bets to a free-bet stake that is not paid back on a win. It sets out which bookmakers carry a Gambling Commission licence, which features each one exposes on its table tennis page, and what the safer-gambling rules require of every licensed site. No picks, no predictions, no guaranteed winners — the kind of certainty nobody selling tips honestly owns. What follows is the architecture a tip is built on, and the levers a punter actually pulls.

Data current as of 27 October 2026; verified against the Gambling Commission’s public register and each operator’s own published terms.

Live betting and cash out on table tennis

A table tennis match is short. Best-of-five contests can finish in under an hour, often closer to forty minutes, which makes them unusually well-suited to in-play betting. By the time you have read the pre-match price, watched the warm-up and clicked through to the betting slip, the first game may already be live. That is the feature a punter is paying for with a live bet: faster reaction to a momentum swing, a chance to lay a pre-match position when the scorer turns, and a market that reopens every few points rather than settling once.

In-play on table tennis runs through three product layers. The first is the live match tracker, which renders point-by-point data the bookmaker either sources from the official tournament feed or stitches together from its own data partners. The second is a refreshed price ladder — moneyline, handicap and total points — that re-publishes every few seconds while the match is in progress. The third is cash out: a button on the open bet that lets the punter settle the wager before the match finishes, at a price the bookmaker recalculates in real time.

Cash out is not free money. It is the bookmaker paying the punter a slightly worse version of the current true value, in exchange for removing the variance on the remaining points. Used well, it locks in a profit on a bet that has gone the right way and removes the risk of a momentum swing wiping the slip. Used as a habit, it bleeds the margin back to the bookmaker every time the punter takes the smaller of the two numbers on screen. The honest reading: cash out is a tool for the punter who has already decided what they would settle for, not a button to press when the price wobbles.

Two structural points matter before staking any live table tennis bet. Service alternates every two points, and once both players reach 10 each serves one point in turn — so a long game is its own rhythm, and the live market reprices the chance a comeback can happen each time the ball changes hands. Punters who watch the serve, who note a player’s habit on deuce, and who know which competitor slows down in the fifth game get a working read on the in-play price that the rest of the field does not have.

In-play on licensed UK sites is allowed under the operator’s own licence conditions and the LCCP. The same legal frame applies as to any other market — the difference is the speed at which prices and customer behaviour move, which is why the safer-gambling controls (deposit limits, time-outs, the financial vulnerability check at higher spend) apply with the same force during a live bet as before one.

Predictions, value bets and staking discipline

A tip is a forecast. A value bet is a forecast whose odds are longer than the probability the event actually has. The two are not the same thing. A punter can call a winner at a price of 1.50 and still lose money, because the price already gave the bookmaker its cut and a winning bet at short odds rarely pays enough to compensate for the next three losers. The job of a tip is to find a price the market has underestimated, not to find the next name on the scoresheet.

That is a harder problem than it looks, because the bookmaker’s margin sits inside every price a punter sees. A match between two evenly rated players at 1.91 / 1.91 looks like an evens fight — but the implied probability is 52.4% on each side, which adds up to 104.8%. The extra 4.8% is the bookmaker’s take, and it is paid by every punter on every market, win or lose. The edge a punter needs to clear it is small but real, and the only way to find it is to estimate the probability of the event by some method independent of the price.

Form, head-to-head, recent schedule and playing style are the inputs to that independent estimate. They do not guarantee anything — table tennis is a sport of single points, and a player who wins the first two games can lose the third to a tactical change that no form line would have flagged. What they do is anchor a probability, and the punter compares that anchor against the odds on the betting page. If the punter’s anchor is at 60% and the price implies 50%, the bet is a value bet; if the anchor is at 45% and the price implies 50%, the bet is not, no matter how strongly the punter “feels” the favourite will win.

Bankroll discipline is the part the tipster industry leaves out. A value bet is only a value bet if the punter stakes an amount proportional to the edge, not an amount proportional to confidence. Staking the same £10 on every selection flattens the variance but throws away the size of the biggest edges. Staking whatever “feels right” lets emotion drive stake size, and emotion is the opposite of discipline. The textbook move is a flat unit — one percent of the bankroll, say, on every selection — or a fractional-Kelly stake that scales the bet with the size of the price gap. Either works. The point is that stake size is set by the maths, not by the mood.

The final piece is that no tip is ever certain. Table tennis is a sport of deuce games and run-away leads; a player up 10-6 has lost the game before, and the live market reprices the chance of a comeback each time the serve changes. Anyone who sells tips as certainties is selling a story, and the punter who buys certainty on a sport this volatile pays for the story in losing slips. The honest frame is that a value bet wins more often than the price implies, over many bets — and that “over many bets” is a span that includes long losing runs.

Bet types, odds and how a price settles

A table tennis betting market comes in three shapes. The moneyline asks which player wins the match. The handicap asks which player wins after a games advantage is applied — Player A minus 1.5 games means the favourite has to win by at least two games for the bet to land. The total points line asks whether the match goes over or under a published number of total games, which on best-of-five contests usually sits between 3.5 and 4.5.

Match winner markets settle on the official result. Handicap markets settle on the result after the spread is applied. Total points markets settle on the count of games played, not points scored inside them. Each market has its own margin, and a bookmaker that runs a 4% margin on the moneyline may run a 7% margin on the handicap or the total — because the bookmaker needs a wider buffer on markets where the public is less informed. The punter who only bets match winners pays one margin; the punter who adds handicaps and totals pays several.

Odds in Great Britain come in two formats. Fractional (5/1, 11/4, evens) is the traditional form; decimal (6.00, 3.75, 2.00) is the form most online betting slips use and the form every calculation in this guide uses. The conversion is simple: fractional a/b becomes decimal a ÷ b + 1. A 5/1 shot at decimal odds is 6.00, an 11/4 shot is 3.75, and evens is 2.00. The decimal price is the total return per unit stake — the stake plus the profit — and the decimal price minus one is the profit per unit stake.

That distinction is the one every punter should carry into a bet. At decimal odds of 2.50, a £10 stake returns £25 — £10 stake plus £15 profit. At decimal odds of 1.50, the same £10 returns £15 — £10 stake plus £5 profit. The bookmaker’s margin is the difference between 100% and the sum of the implied probabilities of every outcome; the punter’s job is to read past it and find a price that exceeds their own probability of the event.

Combination bets — the accumulator, the Lucky 15, the Patent — multiply the odds of each leg into one price. A treble at decimal odds 1.80, 2.20 and 1.60 multiplies out to 6.336, so a £10 stake returns £63.36 on a winning treble. The trade-off is that every leg has to win, and each leg carries its own margin — so a four-fold accumulator is paying four slices of bookmaker take, not one. The accumulator is a fun structure for the punter who wants a small stake on a large payout; it is not a structure that improves the underlying edge on each leg.

A bet builder, often called a same-game multi, lets the punter combine markets on a single match — match winner, total games, handicap — into one price. The trade is the same as any combination bet: each leg carries its own margin, and the bookmaker’s combined margin on the multi is wider than the margin on any single leg. The bet builder is a tool for punters who have a strong read on the script of a match and want to express it as one price; it is not a discount on the cost of the underlying information.

Table tennis tournaments and what the calendar looks like

Table tennis is played year-round, which is one of the reasons a punter can find a match almost any evening of the week. The international calendar is run by the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF), founded in 1926; the Olympic tournament has been part of the Games since 1988. The biggest purse sits on the World Championships, the World Cup and the ITTF World Tour events, which tour across Asia, Europe and Africa through the year.

Below the ITTF sits a dense layer of national leagues and club competitions. The Chinese Super League, the German Bundesliga, the Russian Premier League (where sanctions permit) and the Japanese T-League carry the top club players outside the international circuit and offer the heaviest schedule of matches a punter can bet on. Setanta Cup, the European Champions League and the WTT Contender events fill in the calendar between major ITTF dates. Live markets are thickest during these competitions because the data feed is reliable and the betting public has the most to lose.

The structural feature a punter needs to understand is how short the calendar cycle is. A best-of-five match can finish in under an hour, and a top player can play two or three matches in a day during a tournament. The schedule density means a punter who watches the calendar carefully has a real edge over a punter who does not — a tired player in a late-night match, a player coming off five sets the day before, a player who flew twelve hours to the venue — these are the inputs the price may not have fully absorbed, and they are exactly the inputs that move the value of a bet one way or the other.

Two practical consequences follow for the punter. The first is that the in-play market is unusually active on table tennis, because matches finish and reopen quickly. The second is that the volume of matches means a punter with a disciplined staking plan can run more bets in a week than a punter on, say, golf or tennis — which is itself a reason to keep unit size flat and resist the temptation to stake larger on a busy day.

The bookmaker landscape: what each of the ten operators actually offers

A ranking of “the best” table tennis bookmaker is the wrong frame, because the right bookmaker depends on what the punter actually does with their account. A punter who bets singles wants the lowest margin on the moneyline. A punter who runs accumulators wants the widest range of bet builders and the deepest acca insurance. A punter who watches matches live wants the smoothest in-play platform and a cash-out button that does not freeze at the worst moment. The honest comparison puts each bookmaker next to a feature the punter cares about, not next to a single score.

The ten bookmakers below each hold a Gambling Commission remote licence for fixed-odds betting on real events and are listed on the Commission’s public register. The licence is the floor, not the ceiling: every one of them has passed the Commission’s checks on identity, source of funds and safer-gambling controls, and every one takes part in GAMSTOP. What separates them is what they offer above that floor.

The table is a snapshot, not a verdict. Each operator’s full terms live on its own site, and a feature listed today can be withdrawn tomorrow. What the table does is show where each operator has chosen to invest — racing features at Copybet, Bet600, Bet Ahoy and BetVictor; live-streaming depth at Betfair and 888sport; spread betting at Spreadex; a casino-linked sportsbook at London Bet. The punter who wants to bet table tennis live wants the operator whose in-play product is the smoothest; the punter who bets a Saturday accumulator wants the operator whose acca features are the deepest. The two are different books.

The margin is the same number in every bookmaker, expressed differently. The bookmaker takes a slice of every market, and that slice is the difference between 100% and the sum of implied probabilities across all outcomes. A bookmaker running a 4% margin on a two-way market is paying 96% in implied probabilities back to the punter; one running a 6% margin is paying 94%. Over many bets, the difference compounds, and the punter who shops between bookmakers for the same market pays less margin per bet than the punter who bets only with one.

Spreadex carries a distinction the rest do not. Spreadex is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority for spread betting and by the Gambling Commission for fixed-odds betting, and spread betting losses can exceed the deposit. A punter who uses Spreadex for fixed-odds table tennis is in the same regulatory frame as at any other licensed bookmaker; a punter who opens a spread-bet position on the same match is in a different one, where losses are not capped at the stake. The product is there; the punter should know which side of the regulatory line they are on before they place the bet.

The fundamentals of a table tennis game

A table tennis game is won by the first player to reach 11 points, with a two-point margin required once both players reach 10. Service alternates every two points, and once both players reach 10 each serves one point in turn. A match is the best of any odd number of games; competition matches are typically best of five or seven. Scoring changed from 21 points to 11 in 2001, which is why every bookmaker’s totals line is built around 11-point games.

The dimensions are fixed and matter to anyone who watches the sport closely enough to read a player’s positioning. A table tennis table is 2.74 m long, 1.525 m wide and 76 cm high, with a net 15.25 cm high; the ball is 40 mm in diameter and weighs 2.7 g. Those numbers are not a quiz — they are the reason a player with a longer reach has a small but real advantage on the wide serve, why the higher bounce of certain rubbers suits a flatter table, and why a player who crouches closer to the table has a different reading on a low serve than one who stands back. The punter who knows the geometry reads the tactical battle inside each game.

The other fundamental is the rhythm of a long game. At 10-10 the game is no longer about service dominance; it is about who can hold nerve for the next two points. The market reprices this each time deuce is reached, which is why live betting on table tennis rewards the punter who watches the players rather than the scoreline. A player who has been serving well for two games may not have the same control in the third, and the bookmaker’s margin widens on each refresh of the price.

What UK regulation actually requires of a bookmaker

Every bookmaker serving customers in Great Britain needs a Gambling Commission licence, wherever the operator is based. Since the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014 an operator whose remote facilities are used in Great Britain has needed a Commission licence; a Curaçao, Maltese or Gibraltar licence is not a substitute. The Commission’s public register is the whole test of who holds one — search by business name, trading name, domain or account number, and the licence is either there or it is not.

Betting on table tennis at a licensed operator is legal for anyone aged 18 or over. The operator verifies name, address and date of birth before a customer can deposit or gamble, and the same checks apply to free bets and bonuses. Credit cards are banned for gambling in Great Britain, including credit-card-funded payments through an e-wallet; debit cards and bank-based payments are not covered by that ban. There is no statutory list of permitted bets or markets, so an operator offers markets under its own licence conditions and the LCCP. In-play betting on table tennis is offered by GB bookmakers under those licence conditions.

The licence categories the Commission issues are remote general betting standard (real events), remote general betting standard (virtual events), remote general betting limited, remote pool betting and remote betting intermediary (the licence for betting exchanges). Every bookmaker in the comparison above holds a remote general betting standard (real events) licence, which covers fixed-odds betting on real sporting events. Spread betting on financial instruments is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, not the Commission, and a spread bet on a financial index is a different product from a spread bet on a sporting event.

The player pays no tax on betting winnings in Great Britain. General Betting Duty is the operator’s tax on gross profits, currently 15%, with a new remote betting rate of 25% applying within it from 1 April 2027. Whether operators pass duty on through odds is not established, and the punter is not charged duty directly. A professional gambler should ask HMRC or an adviser; the rest can take the absence of player-side tax as the frame, with no further arithmetic required.

The advertising rules around bookmakers are not the Commission’s own rules. They run through the CAP Code for non-broadcast advertising and the BCAP Code for broadcast, enforced by the ASA, alongside the LCCP marketing conditions. Marketing must be socially responsible, must not be of strong appeal to under-18s, and no one who is or seems to be under 25 may be featured gambling in an advertisement. The rule concerns who may appear in the advertisement, not who may bet. From 19 January 2026 wagering requirements on bonuses are capped at 10x and mixed-product promotions are banned, but whether the cap applies to free bets with no wagering condition is not established.

Safer gambling tools every licensed bookmaker offers

GAMSTOP is the national multi-operator online self-exclusion scheme, and it is a mandatory licence condition for every online bookmaker licensed in Great Britain. Self-exclusion periods are six months, one year, five years, or five years with auto-renewal; after the minimum period the exclusion stays in place for a further seven years unless the customer asks GAMSTOP to remove it. GAMSTOP covers online sites and apps; betting shops use a separate service. Every one of the ten operators in the comparison is a GAMSTOP member.

Deposit limits are a customer-set control. Operators must offer a gross deposit limit on a fixed time frame; the first changes have applied since 31 October 2025, and a second phase was postponed to 30 September 2026. There is no state-set deposit or loss ceiling for betting: limits are the customer’s choice. A punter who sets a daily or monthly limit at registration is making a structural decision about how much variance their bankroll can absorb, and that decision is the one the safer-gambling frame asks the punter to make for themselves.

A financial vulnerability check (LCCP condition 3.4.4, in force since 30 August 2024) applies to licensed remote betting when a customer’s deposits minus withdrawals exceed £150 in a rolling 30 days (since 28 February 2025). It is a public-record check (bankruptcy, county court judgments), not an income check and not a credit reference check. Financial risk assessments — the affordability checks of the press coverage — are announced in a staged plan (Commission article of 7 July 2026), with no start date. The punter who bets small will never see a check; the punter whose net deposits climb above the threshold should expect a question about their public-record finances, not their payslip.

Product restrictions and self-exclusion sit on top of the deposit limit. A punter who wants to block casino products, or block spread betting, or block everything for a cooling-off period, can ask the operator; the operator is required to apply the restriction without delay. Live chat support, links to BeGambleAware, GamCare, GAMSTOP, Gambling Therapy and the BGC appear on every licensed UK bookmaker’s safer-gambling page; Unibet’s own page lists deposit limits, a Player Profile test, product restrictions and self-exclusion as the four controls, and it is a useful checklist for what to look for on any operator’s safer-gambling page.

Help outside the operator’s own tools is independent. GamCare runs the National Gambling Helpline. GambleAware funds treatment and education. NHS gambling clinics offer specialist face-to-face support. Gamblers Anonymous runs peer-led meetings in most major British cities. None of these is a substitute for the punter’s own discipline, and none is a substitute for a deposit limit set at registration — but they are the routes a punter who feels the betting slipping should reach for first, before they reach for the betting slip.

Crypto and anonymity at the table tennis bookmaker

A bookmaker serving customers in Great Britain cannot offer anonymous play. Identity verification happens before the first deposit, and source-of-funds questions at higher spend are normal under the money-laundering rules. Credit cards are banned for gambling. A licensed operator does not accept a deposit without knowing who is making it, and the punter who wants anonymity cannot get it from a licensed UK site.

Crypto betting sits outside the GB-licensed frame. An operator licensed in Curaçao, Malta, Gibraltar or another offshore jurisdiction may accept cryptocurrency deposits and may not require the same identity checks at registration, depending on the licence and the operator’s own rules. The trade is the loss of every protection a GB licence buys — no GAMSTOP coverage, no Commission complaints route, no approved dispute-resolution body, no British consumer redress if funds are withheld, no cap on wagering requirements, no application of the £150 vulnerability check. The honest frame is licensed = checks, limits, GAMSTOP, bonus cap, plus verification before the first bet; unlicensed = none of those protections and possible loss of funds.

The punter who bets table tennis with bitcoin, with ethereum, or with another cryptocurrency is choosing a different product with a different regulatory frame. Whether that product suits them depends on which character they have prioritised — anonymity, fast settlement, a particular set of odds, a particular wallet compatibility — and on whether they have read the operator’s terms on withdrawal times, on dispute resolution and on the jurisdiction that governs the account. None of those choices is illegal at the customer end; all of them sit outside the British consumer protection frame the rest of this guide describes.

The bookmaker landscape is the comparison a punter needs to make for themselves, and the choice between a GB-licensed operator and an offshore crypto-accepting one is one of the clearer choices on the page. A licensed bookmaker verifies identity, charges margin, pays tax and runs safer-gambling controls; an offshore bookmaker may not. The punter decides which of those costs they are willing to pay.

Bonuses, free bets and what the small print actually costs

A bonus is a marketing expense, dressed up as a gift. The bookmaker’s purpose is to get the punter’s account funded and active; the punter’s purpose is to convert the bonus into withdrawable cash. The two purposes meet at the wagering requirement, and the wagering requirement is the number that decides whether the bonus is worth claiming.

The post-19 January 2026 cap on bonuses is 10x. A £10 bonus at the cap needs £100 of qualifying bets to clear; a £50 bonus needs £500; a £100 bonus needs £1,000. Before the cap, 50x was a common figure on casino products, and a £10 bonus at 50x needed £500 of bets. The cap brings the worst-case requirement down sharply, but it does not make every bonus worth claiming. A bonus that requires the punter to bet at minimum odds of 1.50, on markets with a 6% margin, is still a cost the punter pays on top of the £100 turnover.

Free bets are a different product. A free bet is a stake the bookmaker gives the punter, on terms the punter accepts: usually a minimum price, usually a deadline, usually a list of eligible markets. The free-bet stake is usually not paid back with a win — a £10 free bet at odds 3.00 pays £30 (the £10 stake disappears), not £40. That detail is the one most often missed, because the marketing language reads like the punter is getting a £10 bet to keep. The honest reading is that the punter is getting a £20 profit on a winning £10 free bet at evens, not a £30 return.

The expected cost of clearing a bonus, at the simplest reading, is the turnover multiplied by the margin of the markets the punter bets on. A £100 turnover on a market with a 5% margin costs the punter £5 in expected value, before the bonus is even counted. If the bonus itself is £10 and the punter clears the turnover on a market that costs them £5 in margin, the net value of the offer is £5 — not £10. The punter who bets a higher-margin market to clear the bonus, or who bets short-priced favourites, gives back more margin and earns less of the bonus.

A “risk-free” bet is a free bet that is refunded if it loses — usually as a free bet, not as cash. The marketing word reads like the punter cannot lose; the small print says the punter will not lose their stake on the first bet, and that the refund is a free bet with the same stake-not-returned term as a normal free bet. A punter who treats the offer as a genuine second chance is paying the marketing price for the framing; a punter who reads it as a free bet with a refund-on-loss clause knows exactly what it is worth.

Each operator in the comparison above carries its own offer. Bet Ahoy publishes a 10% Acca Bonus up to £1,000, a Sub-Cover feature for player substitutions, Best Odds Guaranteed on UK and Irish racing up to £100, and a Double Result payout on UK and Irish racing. NetBet publishes Daily Boosts, Profit Boosts and free bet offers, plus a Bet Builder with instant dynamic odds. Spreadex publishes a £60 free-bet bundle for a £10 qualifying fixed-odds bet, usable across fixed odds and spread betting, with the qualifying bet to be placed within 28 days of account opening. The other operators carry their own combinations, and each one is described in the operator’s own terms — not printed as a working code on this page.

How the bookmaker’s margin shows up in the odds

A two-way market at decimal odds of 1.90 / 1.90 — the kind of even-money price a bookmaker offers on a balanced match — is the cleanest place to see the margin. The implied probability of 1.90 is 1 ÷ 1.90 = 52.63%, so two outcomes imply 52.63% + 52.63% = 105.26% between them. The extra 5.26% is the bookmaker’s take, and the payout share (the proportion of every unit staked that the bookmaker returns to winning punters in the long run) is 100% − 5.26% = 94.74%.

Stated as a band rather than a single figure, the margin on a balanced two-way market sits between roughly 3% and 8% at most licensed UK bookmakers. The lower end belongs to the deeper markets on the most-followed competitions; the upper end belongs to the smaller fixtures or the less-popular markets, where the bookmaker needs a wider buffer because the public is less informed. Table tennis sits in the middle band on most UK sites — not as thin as a Premier League match-winner market, not as wide as a niche e-sports outright.

The punter who bets only on the lowest-margin markets pays the bookmaker the least per bet. The punter who mixes moneyline, handicap and totals pays several margins, and the total cost is the weighted average across markets. The accumulator is the extreme case — every leg carries its own margin, and the combined cost is the sum of the slices. Over many bets, the difference between a 4% margin and a 6% margin compounds, and the punter who bets 200 bets a year at the higher margin hands over £40 per £1,000 staked that the lower-margin punter keeps.

The honest reading is that the margin is not a number the punter can negotiate. It is built into every price, on every market, at every bookmaker. The punter’s only lever is which market to bet on, and which bookmaker to bet with, and the spread of those choices over a year is the difference between a punter who keeps most of their edge and a punter who gives it back to the bookmaker.

Frequently asked questions about table tennis betting

How do you win at table tennis betting?

A punter wins at table tennis betting by finding prices whose decimal odds exceed the punter’s own estimate of the probability, then staking an amount proportional to that gap and not chasing losses when the bets lose. Form, head-to-head and schedule are inputs to the probability estimate; staking discipline is what keeps the edge across many bets. No tip is ever certain, and no system can guarantee a winning month.

How do you bet on table tennis?

A punter opens an account with a Gambling Commission-licensed bookmaker, completes identity verification, sets a deposit limit and places a bet from the table tennis page. Bets can be placed pre-match or in-play, on the match winner, on a handicap or on a total-points line, or as a same-game multi via a Bet Builder. The punter needs to be 18 or over and the account must be in the punter’s own name.

How does a table tennis bet work?

A table tennis bet wagers on the outcome of a match — which player wins, the result after a handicap, or the total number of games played. Decimal odds describe the total return per unit stake, including the stake itself. A winning single at odds 2.50 on a £10 stake returns £25, of which £10 is the stake and £15 is the profit. Settling happens after the official result is recorded.

What is a value bet, and why is no tip ever certain?

A value bet is a bet whose decimal odds imply a probability lower than the punter’s independent estimate of the chance the event will happen. The punter’s edge is the gap between the two. No tip is ever certain because table tennis is a sport of single points, momentum swings and deuce games, and any model that claimed certainty on the next point would be claiming more than the sport allows.

What is the bookmaker’s margin, and how does it show up in the odds?

The bookmaker’s margin is the share of every unit staked that the bookmaker keeps on average across a market. It is the difference between 100% and the sum of the implied probabilities of every outcome — for example, decimal odds 1.90 on each side of a two-way market imply 52.63% per outcome and 105.26% in total, a margin of 5.26%. The punter pays it on every bet, win or lose.

How is the return on a bet worked out from the stake and the odds?

The return is the stake multiplied by the decimal odds. A £10 stake at decimal odds of 2.50 returns £25 in total — the £10 stake plus £15 profit. The profit alone is the stake multiplied by the decimal odds minus one. A combination bet multiplies the odds of each leg into one price, and the stake is multiplied by that combined price on a winning combination.

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