Dutching calculator

Split a stake across selections

Enter every outcome you want to cover and what you are staking in total. Names are only labels — the split depends on the odds alone.

What dutching actually buys you

This is the part most dutching guides skip. Covering two outcomes of a three-way market raises your chance of getting money back from roughly 42% to roughly 72%, and cuts what you get back when you are right. Neither number is better than the other; they are the same bet arranged differently. It is worth doing when the reading rules out one outcome but cannot pick between the other two — which is a genuine and fairly common state of knowledge about a football match.

It is worth avoiding when it is used to feel safer. Spreading a stake across four selections of a market that carries a 6% margin means paying that margin on all four, and a run of near-misses costs the same as a run of clear losses.

Two selections or three, with numbers

Take a match priced at 2.40, 3.30 and 3.10. Backing the home win alone with 100 returns 240 if it lands and nothing otherwise, and the price implies it lands 41.7% of the time. Dutching all three outcomes returns 95.94 whatever happens — a certain loss of 4.06, which is the market's 4.23% overround collected in full.

Now cover only the home win and the draw. The stakes become 57.89 and 42.11, the return is 138.95, and the calculator reports the book summing to 71.97% — under 100%, which looks like guaranteed profit and is not. The away win is uncovered, and it takes the whole 100 with it about 32% of the time. The honest reading is a 38.95 gain on roughly two thirds of occasions against a 100 loss on the other third, which averages out to the same small negative as before.

That is the whole point of the two-versus-three comparison: partial dutching is a normal bet with a higher strike rate and a smaller payout, not a hedge. It is worth doing when the reading genuinely rules an outcome out. It is not worth doing to make a screen look safer.

The arithmetic, in full

Each price is turned into an implied probability by dividing 1 by it: 3.00 implies 33.33%, 4.00 implies 25%. Those add up to 58.33%. Each selection then receives its own share of that total — 33.33 divided by 58.33 is 57.14% — applied to the stake. The return is the stake of a selection multiplied by its odds, and because the shares were set by the inverses, that product is the same for every selection.

The sum of the implied probabilities is the number worth watching. In a complete market it is above 100%, and the excess is the bookmaker's margin — the overround. Dutching spreads your stake across more of that overround rather than avoiding it, which is why the profit figure above goes negative on a normally priced market.

Below 100% the arithmetic says guaranteed profit, but only under a condition the calculator cannot check for you: the selections must cover every possible outcome. Two sides of a three-way market always sum below 100% and guarantee nothing, because the uncovered result loses the whole stake. That distinction is the single most common error in dutching, and it is why the panel above says it in words rather than just showing a green number.

About this page

Bilhete Pronto is a Brazilian football tipping site, published in Portuguese. This is the English version of one of its calculators; the rest of the site — the model's published predictions, the verified results ledger and the odds comparison — is in Portuguese. The Portuguese page also covers the lay side of the same calculation and the exchange commission.

Betting is for adults only. In Brazil, fixed-odds betting is regulated by Law 14,790/2023 and operators must be authorised by the Prizes and Betting Secretariat. If betting has stopped being fun, the CVV answers on 188, free, 24 hours a day.

Canonical home: https://bilhetepronto.co