Cricket betting odds in 2026: how the price is made and which bookmakers do it best

Updated October 2026

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

The price a bookmaker shows on a cricket match is not the probability of the event. It is the probability with the bookmaker’s margin baked in, dressed up as a number. Read it that way and the whole market opens up. Read it as “what will happen” and you are betting blind against someone whose job is the opposite of yours. This guide is about the second reading, in the place a British bettor actually bets: the regulated market, where every brand on the ranking below is on the public register and every term that costs you money is in writing on the operator’s site.

In-play cricket: the live market that punishes hesitation

Cricket moves differently from football. A single over is a discrete event with a clear end and a clear start; the run rate between two overs tells you something the bookmaker has already priced, but the next ball can swing the market by ten or fifteen points within a delivery. That is what makes in-play cricket one of the sharpest live markets on a British bookmaker’s site, and also one of the most expensive places to be wrong.

The default in-play product at the larger operators covers the obvious shapes: next over runs, next wicket method, method of dismissal, fall of next wicket, total runs at end of over, and the match winner market repriced ball by ball as the run rate drifts. At the deeper end, bookmakers price batter and bowler markets through an innings (top batter, top bowler, man of the match) and the more specialist lines such as partnership milestones and runs in the next five overs. A few operators push further into ball-by-ball markets, which is where the volatility lives and where the margin is widest.

Cash out sits beside the in-play product rather than inside it. The green button on the bet slip is the bookmaker buying the bet back from you at a price it has set from its own model, seconds before the market re-prices the underlying event. Used in the first few overs of a T20 when a wicket falls, it can mean the difference between a small green figure on the slip and a red one. Used as a habit on every match, it bleeds the punter quietly, because the bookmaker’s quoted cash-out price is wider than the price the same selection could be traded at on the exchange a second later. The bettor who cashes out on principle pays for that principle.

Two things decide whether in-play cricket is worth playing. The first is whether the operator’s live market is deep enough that you can actually back the view you have formed; a thin in-play product with a “next over runs” line and nothing else is a place to be cautious. The second is whether the operator shows its live data feed openly. The bookmakers that publish the actual run rate, the required rate and the asking rate in real time are the ones whose markets are worth thinking about; the ones that hide the live ticker are the ones whose prices you take on trust.

A practical note. In-play betting in Great Britain is offered by licensed operators under their own licence conditions and customer-protection duties. The market is not, in any meaningful sense, “unrestricted” — it is governed by the operator’s house rules, by social responsibility codes under the LCCP, and by the same verification that governs everything else. The punt who behaves as if it is unrestricted is the one the protection is designed to catch.

Cricket predictions, forecasts and the discipline of thinking before you bet

There is no such thing as a free cricket tip that wins. The phrase does useful work for the person selling it and none for the person paying for it. Cricket has more variables than almost any other sport a British bookmaker prices — pitch, weather, hour of the day, format, length of the batting order, the side’s selection policy, the form of individuals over very small samples — and the price the bookmaker posts has already absorbed the part of the public information that is knowable. The edge, if there is one, lives in the part the market has not priced: an injury the team has not announced, a pitch report you have read more carefully than the model has, a bowler’s record at a ground the model under-weights.

Three habits separate a sharp cricket bettor from a recreational one, and none of them is “following tips”. The first is keeping a record: every bet, the price taken, the closing price, the result. The closing price matters because it is the most efficient price the market produced; if your price was a long way worse than the closing price, the bet was bad before the result. The second is bankroll management — staking a fixed small percentage of the bank on any single bet, so a bad week does not end the activity. The third is line shopping: checking the same selection at three or four operators before placing it, because the margin varies brand by brand and the difference between 1.85 and 1.91 on the same outcome compounds over a season.

Forecasting models for cricket tend to over-fit to recent form. A bowler who has taken six wickets in the last three ODIs is not six times as likely to take three in the next one; the sample is too small and the opposition too varied. The bookmaker knows this. The model you build has to know it too, or you will find yourself betting into prices that have already been corrected for the very thing you thought you had spotted.

A serious prediction, in the sense a punter can act on, is the output of a process, not the input to one. If the process is “I read the team sheet, I checked the pitch, I checked the weather, I checked three bookmakers, I have a model that says something” — that is a prediction worth acting on. If the process is “I have a feeling” — that is a stake, not a prediction, and the stake should be small.

Bet types and how the odds are built

The core vocabulary of cricket betting is the same as the rest of sports betting, with a few cricket-shaped additions. A single is one bet on one selection. A double is two selections, both of which must win. A treble is three. An accumulator — “acca” in the trade — is four or more, all of which must win, and the odds multiply together so a four-fold at 1.50, 1.70, 1.80 and 1.50 returns 6.89 for every pound staked. Each-way is two bets of equal stake, one on the win and one on the place, and the place terms are set by the operator and vary by field size.

The cricket-specific shapes are the ones that distinguish a serious cricket bettor from someone who has wandered in from football. Top batter is the single-selection market on who scores the most runs in an innings; top bowler is the parallel market for wickets. Method of dismissal is a small but live market, especially in Test cricket when a tail-end batsman is in. The next-over runs market is the in-play workhorse. Player performance markets — to score fifty, to take three wickets, to hit a six — appear in the bigger matches and not in the smaller ones, which is itself a signal of how deep the operator’s pricing goes.

What the price actually says

Decimal odds of 1.91 on a side imply a probability of about 52.4%, in the sense that 1 divided by 1.91 is 0.524. That is not the same as saying the side has a 52.4% chance of winning. It is saying that, if the bookmaker’s model is exactly right, a stake at 1.91 returns 1.91 for every pound risked. The difference is the margin, and the margin is the bookmaker’s edge.

For a two-way market with decimal odds of 1.90 and 1.90, the payout share is 1 divided by (1/1.90 plus 1/1.90), which is about 0.526, and the margin is about 47.4% — far wider than any sane cricket market. That number is illustrative: it shows what a balanced but razor-thin two-way market would look like if both sides were priced at the same short number, which is the price the bookmaker gives favourites and which says more about the structure of the book than the value of either selection. Real cricket markets on a licensed site run a margin closer to 4–8% on match winner and considerably wider on the exotic markets — top batter, method of dismissal, next-over runs. As a band: most pre-match cricket markets at a major licensed operator sit between 4% and 10% margin, with the in-play and exotic lines wider. That range is the right context against which to read any single price.

The price a bookmaker shows is also a moving target. The opening price is the first number posted, often days before the match, when the only information is the two team sheets and the venue. The price drifts as money comes in, as team news lands, as the weather forecast firms up. The closing price is the last number the bookmaker posts before play — the most efficient price of the day, because the most information has been priced in. The price you actually take is somewhere on that journey, and the closer to the closing price the better.

Combination bets, each-way and the cost of a “safer” bet

A combination bet (an accumulator) pays more than the sum of its parts because every leg multiplies the odds, but every leg is a chance to lose. A four-fold at 1.40, 1.80, 1.60 and 1.50 returns 6.05 for a one-pound stake; the four singles at the same prices return 1.50, 1.70, 1.80 and 1.50, a total of 6.50 if all four win. The accumulator paid 0.39 more for the same set of outcomes, but it pays zero if any one leg loses. The each-way structure doubles the stake and pays out on the place as well as the win, at a fraction of the win price, with place terms set by the operator.

These structures are not free. The accumulator’s extra 0.39 of return is the bookmaker’s way of saying it likes the additional risk it has taken on, and the each-way structure is two bets at a margin, not one. The punter who treats an acca as a cheaper way to back four favourites has the maths wrong. The punter who treats it as a way to turn four small edges into one large payout is closer to right, and the only way to know which is to track the closing line.

Sports, tournaments and the calendar that drives the cricket market

Cricket comes in three international formats, and the format shapes the market. Test cricket is the oldest and the longest: up to five days, up to four innings, a minimum of ninety overs a day, and a match that ends in a draw is a draw, not a defeat. One Day Internationals are fifty overs per side; a tie is a tie, and a rain-affected ODI is settled by the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method unless too few overs are bowled to make a target meaningful. Twenty20 is the shortest — twenty overs per side, a bowler capped at four overs, a tied match decided by a super over.

The tournament calendar flows through the year. The international men’s calendar is anchored by the ICC events: the T20 World Cup, the Cricket World Cup (the fifty-over event), and the World Test Championship, whose inaugural season began in 2019. Domestic T20 leagues — the Indian Premier League, the Big Bash, the Hundred, the Caribbean Premier League, the Pakistan Super League and the rest — run alongside the international schedule and produce the highest-volume betting weeks of the year for the British market. County cricket sits beneath all of this, with a longer season and a thinner book.

The 2026 ICC Men’s T20 World Cup was held in India and Sri Lanka between 7 February and 8 March 2026, with twenty teams and a final that India won by ninety-six runs against New Zealand. It is a useful reference point for what a major tournament market looks like at a British bookmaker: extensive outright markets, daily match markets, in-play coverage from ball one, and operator-specific features (price boosts, bet builders, acca insurance) layered on top. The market after the final is shorter and quieter until the next marquee event lands.

The market for women’s international cricket has grown materially in the last few seasons. The major operators carry the WPL, the WBBL, the Hundred’s women’s competition and the women’s international fixtures, with a market depth that is shallower than the men’s equivalent but a margin that is often tighter because the market is less efficient. The Hundred itself — the eight-team, 100-ball English competition that runs in late summer — has become a reliable week for the British bookmaker’s cricket product: short matches, frequent fixtures, and a high in-play volume.

The ten bookmakers that matter for cricket in Great Britain

The ranking below is the set of operators the Gambling Commission’s public register lists against a remote general betting (real events) licence. Several are household names in British betting; a few are smaller and a few are specialist. Each one is reviewed for what it does well on cricket, where it falls short and what the bettor who picks it is actually getting. The order is not a league table and not a recommendation.

Bet600

A newer face on the British market with a clean price-boost product and the usual Best Odds Guaranteed on racing. The cricket product is not the deepest in the set; the firm’s roots are in the racing and greyhound market and the cricket book shows it. The welcome structure is competitive at headline but small in absolute value. For a punter who bets mostly racing and wants a cricket side-bet option, Bet600 sits comfortably in the second tier of the book.

bet365

The deepest cricket book on the British market, the deepest in-play product, and the operator most likely to have a price on a niche market before the rest of the market has it. Bet Builder+ lets you combine markets from the same match into a single selection, pre-match and in-play; the Super Boosts and daily Bet Boosts are layered on top of the standard book. The welcome offer is modest in headline terms and is structured around credits rather than cash. For a punter who treats cricket as a serious market rather than a side bet, bet365 is the benchmark the others are measured against, and the one whose closing line is the one the rest of the market is most likely to follow.

BetMGM

An American brand on British soil, with the welcome structure that says so: four £10 free bets, of which two are reserved for football accumulators of four or more selections and two for sports multiples of two or more. The offer is tightly segmented, and the cricket reader who reads the small print and finds that two of the four free bets are not usable on cricket in any form has a real point to make. The rest of the BetMGM product — market depth, in-play, app — sits at the level the rest of the MGM brands reach, which is to say solid rather than best-in-class. Useful for the bettor who likes the wider MGM product and wants a free-bet welcome shaped around it.

BoyleSports

A long-established Irish bookmaker with a UK licence, with a welcome that is generous in absolute terms: £20 in free bets on a £10 qualifying bet for UK customers, with a parallel €30 in free bets for Irish customers on a €10 bet. The cricket book is not the deepest in this set but it covers the major fixtures, the outright tournaments and the in-play match winner. The value of the welcome is real; the value of the rest of the product is ordinary. For a punt-and-move bettor who wants the welcome and does not intend to stay, BoyleSports is a viable option; for a customer looking for a deeper cricket-specific book, there are more focused alternatives.

Octobet

A 50% back-as-free-bet welcome up to £50, plus a £10 casino bonus. The “back” structure is the same shape as a refund — you place a bet, you lose, you get a free bet of half the stake up to a cap. The shape is friendlier than a small free bet on a small qualifying bet, but the cap means the offer matters more for a smaller-stake punter than for a larger one. The cricket product is mid-tier; the rest of the offer (the casino side) is irrelevant to a cricket-only bettor and only relevant if you want it to be.

Dabble

The “Bet £10, Get £10 in Free Bets” structure is a simple and honest one, and the 7-day expiry with the stake not returned is the standard small print for the shape. The product has a social feed built into it, which is a different proposition from the rest of the table — the in-app experience is built around following other punters’ bets, which is either a feature or a distraction depending on the punter. For a bettor who enjoys the social side of the hobby, Dabble is the standout option; for those who prefer a quiet, traditional betting experience, other books offer a more standard interface.

Sky Bet

The British household name whose free-bet terms are the cleanest in the set: 30 days to use them, single or each-way only, no virtuals, non-withdrawable, stake not returned. The shape of the welcome is less generous at headline than some of the table, and the structure (no multiples) is the most restrictive. The cricket book is deep, the in-play is solid, and the brand is the one most British punters have an account with already. For a bettor who wants the everyday operator and is not chasing the headline offer, Sky Bet is the sensible default.

Fitzwilliam Sports

A Dublin bookmaker with a capped membership and a “High Stakes Welcome” subject to compliance criteria, which is the small print for “we will not say in advance what the welcome is, because it depends on who you are”. The operator carries instant deposits, fast withdrawals, timeouts and deposit limits, and links to GambleAware, GamStop and Gamblers Anonymous — the safer-gambling furniture in the right place. The cricket book is not the deepest. For a high-stakes punter who wants a smaller, more personal book and is willing to be assessed, Fitzwilliam is an unusual and distinct option; for the mainstream punter, the table offers more predictable, standard alternatives.

Kwiff

A trademark operated by Spryme Ltd, licensed by the Gambling Commission, with the operator’s distinctive selling point being “surprise” odds boosts that land unpredictably. The shape is part of the fun for the punter who treats betting as entertainment, and a margin concern for the punter who treats it as a market. The cricket book sits in the middle of the table. The 17+ App Store age rating is the standard British operator rating and tells you the operator is on the British App Store at all. A reasonable mid-table choice.

QuinnBet

Best Odds Guaranteed on UK and Irish horse racing from 10am daily, on singles, multiples and system bets, with a maximum benefit of £150 per customer per race. The BOG structure is the cleanest in the table and the cap is generous enough to be relevant to most punters. The cricket book is mid-table, the in-play is solid, and the rest of the product is built around racing with cricket as a serious secondary market. For a punter whose primary interest is racing and who wants a credible cricket side market, QuinnBet is a strong fit.

How cricket betting fits into the British regulatory frame

Cricket betting in Great Britain sits inside a regulated market with a single national regulator and a single public test of who is licensed. The Gambling Commission, a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, is the regulator. The Gambling Act 2005 is the statute (with the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014 amending it for remote gambling). The framework covers England, Scotland and Wales; Northern Ireland runs on a different and older law, which is why a British operator’s licence is described as a “GB licence” rather than a UK-wide one.

The Commission’s public register is the test of who holds a licence. It can be searched by business name, trading name, domain or account number. Every brand on the ranking above appears on it. A brand that does not appear on it is operating outside the British regulatory frame, and the difference matters: a GB-licensed brand has to meet the LCCP, take part in GAMSTOP, cap bonus wagering requirements at 10x, run the financial vulnerability check at £150 of net deposits in a rolling thirty days, verify the customer’s name, address and date of birth before the first deposit, and offer a deposit limit under RTS 12. A non-GB-licensed brand has to meet none of those conditions, and a customer using one has no British route for complaints, no approved dispute-resolution body and no certainty of getting funds back if the operator decides not to pay.

Three points are worth making in their own right. First, the customer in Great Britain is not, on the evidence available, committing an offence by betting with an unlicensed operator — the offence is the operator’s, under section 33 of the 2005 Act. The customer is, however, choosing to give up the protection the licence provides. Second, “best odds” claims in marketing are not regulated for truth; a price the bookmaker posts is a price the bookmaker can change. Third, the ban on credit cards for gambling in Great Britain (since 14 April 2020) covers credit-card-funded payments through an e-wallet as well as direct credit-card payments, so the punter who tops up an e-wallet from a credit card and then uses the e-wallet to deposit at a bookmaker is on the wrong side of the rule.

The tax point is simple. The player in Great Britain pays no tax on betting winnings. General Betting Duty is the operator’s tax, at 15% on gross profits for the period up to 31 March 2027, with a new 25% rate on remote bets (other than UK horse racing) from 1 April 2027 under the policy paper of 26 November 2025. Whether the operator passes the duty on through tighter odds is not established and not knowable from a single price. The punter who assumes it does is guessing; the punter who treats the duty as a fact of the operator’s cost base and shops around for the best price is reading the market correctly.

Responsible gambling: the framework the licensed market actually provides

GAMSTOP is the national multi-operator online self-exclusion scheme and a mandatory licence condition for every online operator in Great Britain. The minimum exclusion period is six months; the longer periods are one year, five years, and 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; the betting shops run a separate, in-shop self-exclusion scheme. Every customer who has chosen to use GAMSTOP and is registered with the scheme is blocked at the account-opening stage of every GB-licensed online operator, which is the single sharpest tool the British regulatory frame provides for the customer who has decided to stop.

The financial vulnerability check, in force since 30 August 2024 under LCCP condition 3.4.4 and operational since 28 February 2025, applies when a customer’s net deposits (deposits minus withdrawals) exceed £150 in a rolling thirty days. It is a public-record check — for example a bankruptcy register or a county court judgment — not an income check and not a credit-reference check. It exists to catch the customer whose financial position has changed in a way that the operator should be asking about, not to second-guess the customer’s own budgeting. Financial risk assessments, the “affordability checks” the press has been reporting on, are announced in a staged plan, with no start date established in the public material. The right way to write that is “announced, staged, no start date” — not “in force” and not “soon”.

Deposit limits are the customer’s tool, not the regulator’s. Under RTS 12, the operator must offer a gross deposit limit on a fixed time frame, and the first changes have applied since 31 October 2025. A second phase was postponed to 30 September 2026, and whether it is live at the time of reading is not established. There is no state-set deposit or loss ceiling for betting in Great Britain. The state sets the minimum age (18), the verification standard (name, address and date of birth before the first deposit), the credit-card ban and the bonus-wagering cap. The deposit ceiling is the customer’s choice, and a customer who sets one — at any level, including a low one — is doing the work the regulator will not do for them.

The help lines are the right place to start if the picture has changed. GamCare runs the National Gambling Helpline. GambleAware funds treatment and education. The NHS runs gambling clinics in several regions. Gamblers Anonymous runs peer-support meetings. The links are on every licensed operator’s safer-gambling page, which is a regulatory requirement and not a courtesy; the absence of those links on an operator’s site is a sign the operator is not what it says it is.

Bonuses and free bets on cricket: what the offer really costs

A “free bet” is not free. The headline figure is the size of the free bet the customer receives; the cost is the qualifying bet the customer has to place to unlock it, the wagering requirements (where they apply) and the conditions the customer has to meet to withdraw anything the free bet wins. The cost is the number that matters, and the cost is almost always wider than the marketing suggests.

The welcome offers on the ranking above are a fair sample. BoyleSports’ £20 in free bets on a £10 qualifying bet is a 2:1 return on the qualifying stake with the small print attached. BetMGM’s four £10 free bets require a £10 deposit and a qualifying sports bet within seven days, and two of the four free bets are reserved for football accas of four or more selections and two for sports multiples of two or more — the cricket reader who takes the welcome and finds that only half the free bets are usable on cricket in any form has read the offer correctly. Sky Bet’s free bets are single or each-way only, which excludes the multiple market entirely. Dabble’s seven-day expiry with the stake not returned is the standard small print for the shape. Octobet’s 50%-back-as-free-bet up to £50 is a refund shape, not a gift — the qualifying bet is the one that funds the free bet, and the cap means a small-stake punter gets a more relevant offer than a large-stake one.

The wagering requirement is the part most punters skip. Since 19 January 2026, wagering requirements on bonuses are capped at 10x in Great Britain (a £10 bonus at 50x would need £500 of qualifying bets; under the cap no more than £100). That cap applies to the bonus itself, and whether it applies to free bets with no wagering condition is not established. Mixed-product promotions — an offer that requires the customer to gamble on two or more product types such as betting, casino, bingo and lottery, for example “bet on football to get free spins” — are banned under the same rules. The right way to read a British welcome offer in 2026 is: the headline number, the qualifying stake, the time limit, the markets the offer is restricted to, the minimum price the qualifying bet has to be at, and the cap on what the offer is worth. If any of those is not in the small print, the small print has not been read.

Price boosts, accumulator insurance and acca boosts are a separate category. A price boost is the bookmaker inflating a price for a limited period, often to a level the underlying market would not clear at on the exchange. A “boost” to 50/1 on a non-favourite is a marketing number, not a market number. Accumulator insurance refunds the stake as a free bet or as cash if one leg of a multiple lets the customer down; the standard shape is “if one team lets you down, your stake is back as a free bet”, with a cap and a minimum number of legs. Both shapes are useful in the right place and a quiet drain in the wrong one; the punter who treats them as a substitute for line shopping is paying the bookmaker for the privilege of betting at a worse price.

Cricket on a phone: apps, mobile sites and the live market in your pocket

Cricket is a sport that rewards watching, and the live cricket market is the one the bookmaker’s mobile app exists to serve. A serious cricket app does four things: it streams the live markets alongside a live score feed, it lets the customer place and cash out in two or three taps, it surfaces the in-play prices in a way that does not require a fresh login every over, and it pushes the price boosts and bet builder products in a way that is informative rather than spammy.

The deeper operators in the ranking — bet365, Sky Bet, BetMGM — sit at the level where the in-play product on the phone is meaningfully different from the in-play product on a desktop. bet365’s Bet Builder+ and Super Boosts are designed first for the phone; the Bet Builder alone is more useful in a sport with the shape of cricket, where the customer wants to combine top batter, top bowler and match result into a single selection, than in a sport with the shape of football. The mid-tier operators — QuinnBet, Kwiff, Bet600, Octobet — have functional apps without the depth of the top of the table; the experience is competent rather than best-in-class. BoyleSports and Fitzwilliam Sports carry the same shape on a slightly different chassis.

Three things are worth checking before installing any cricket app. The first is the live data feed: a real live score, not a delayed one, with the run rate, the required rate and the asking rate visible. The second is the cash-out button: present on singles, multiples and bet builders, and updated within a second or two of a market move. The third is the deposit and withdrawal flow: a frictionless deposit from a debit card or a bank-based method, and a withdrawal back to the same method, with no manual intervention. The customer who has to email support to withdraw has chosen the wrong operator.

The mobile site is the fallback for the punter who does not want to install another app. The serious British operators run a mobile site that mirrors the app’s product at a slightly slower pace, and the gap between the two is no longer the gap it was five years ago. For the punter who bets once a fortnight on a Test match, the mobile site is enough. For the punter who is on the in-play market every evening of an IPL week, the app is the right tool.

Frequently asked questions

How does a bet on cricket actually work?

Pick a market — match winner, top batter, next over runs, method of dismissal — and a selection within it. Type the stake, the slip shows the potential return as the stake times the decimal odds, and the bet is placed when the customer confirms. If the selection wins at the end of the market, the slip pays out at the price taken. The same shape works in-play and pre-match, with the in-play slip updating in real time and the cash-out button appearing once the bet is live.

What is the difference between pre-match and in-play betting on cricket?

Pre-match is the bet placed before the first ball, on a price the bookmaker set days or hours earlier. In-play is the bet placed while the match is being played, on a price the bookmaker is updating ball by ball. In-play prices are wider in margin than pre-match prices, because the bookmaker’s risk is shorter and the data is moving. The pre-match price on a match winner at a major operator is the most efficient price of the day; the in-play price is the most reactive.

Is there a way to win consistently at cricket betting?

No system wins consistently at cricket betting, and the punter who is sold one is being sold a story. The honest version is: the punter who shops the line across three or four operators, who keeps a record of every bet and the closing price, who stakes a fixed small percentage of the bank and who treats the bookmaker’s welcome offers as a small one-off edge rather than a long-term strategy, will lose less than the punter who does none of those things. “Loses less” is not “wins”. The two are different shapes of word and a serious reader keeps them apart.

How can a customer check that a bookmaker holds a Gambling Commission licence?

The Commission’s public register can be searched by business name, trading name, domain or account number at the regulator’s own site. The register entry for a remote general betting (real events) licence is the test the operator is licensed at all. The trading name and the brand on the punter’s account are the two strings to search on; the account number is the unique identifier. A brand whose register entry is missing or whose licence category does not cover the product the customer is using is operating outside the GB frame, and the customer has given up the protections the licence provides.

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

For decimal odds, the return is the stake multiplied by the odds. A £10 stake at 2.50 returns £25, of which £10 is the stake and £15 is the profit. For a combination bet — an accumulator — the legs’ odds multiply into one price before the stake is applied, so a four-fold at 1.50, 1.70, 1.80 and 1.50 returns 6.89 times the stake. The bookmaker’s margin sits inside every price and is the reason the implied probabilities of the selections in a market add up to more than 100%.

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