Canadian Bets: What Are They?

A Canadian bet is a five-selection bet that involves 26 separate bets. It is made up of ten doubles, ten trebles, five four-fold accumulators and one five-fold accumulator, and as there are no single bets in a Canadian, it does not cover all the potential winning outcomes.
A Canadian effectively consists of 26 stakes, one for each bet, so a £1 Canadian costs £26, and for the wager to produce a return, at least two of the selections must be successful.

This is a bet often used by horse racing bettors, but it can be employed across a wide range of sports betting markets. So how does a Canadian work?

Examples

Let’s say you have chosen five selections in five different horse races, and they are offered with the following odds:

Horse 1 14/4
Horse 2 8/1
Horse 3 5/1
Horse 4 5/1
Horse 5 7/4

Placing a £1 win only Canadian on these selections would cost £26. To calculate the potential winnings for a Canadian, you may find it helpful to use a bet calculator. In this case, the potential winnings, based on all five selections being successful is £29,360.13

The Canadian also shows a return if just two of the selections are successful. For example, if the first two bets win, you would earn a return of £135. This is one of the reasons why some bettors prefer Canadians to accumulator bets. With a Canadian, the bet doesn’t fail simply because one of the selections fails.

It is also possible to place an Each Way Canadian. The cost of an Each Way £1 Canadian is £52, and if we use the selections above, the potential winnings would be 29850.23. If none of the selections won, but all placed, the return would still be a healthy £551.98.
As these examples show, the Canadian can be a lucrative bet. To give a further example, here are the likely returns for a £1 win-only Canadian with five Even money selections:

If two selections win, your return is £4
If three selections win, your return is £20
If four selections win, your return is £72
If five selections win, your return is £232

As you can see it is possible to produce a good return when using a Canadian, even if you stick to short-priced selections, while the returns on bigger-priced bets can be enormous. The other advantage of the Canadian is that, although the biggest returns are generated by five correct selections, you can still sometimes profit if only two of the selections win.

As mentioned above, if you are considering making a Canadian bet, but are not sure about the relation of your initial stake to the potential return, it is a good idea to use a bet calculator.

Some bookmakers may offer this facility, but there are plenty of free calculators online. You should also note that the Canadian is sometimes known as a Super Yankee. You can learn about Yankee betting here.

What is needed to win a Canadian bet?

If all the actual outcomes turned out to be evens, then we would say that you would be needing four out of the five selections to turn out to be true for you to have a chance of making a profit. However, if all of the five selections end up being correct predictions then you will certainly be receiving the best returns!

The best trick when it comes to placing a Canadian bet is to ensure that you only select selections which you believe are as close as you can get to a sure thing and at this point you should not be worrying about the odds, it is the outcome which should be grasping your attention instead. A minimum of two selections should come in if you are looking to gain a good return, however we would certainly recommend that you aim for three selections.

Of course, odds vary and that is just the industry of betting so we would say that if you would like a brief idea of what you could win then you should certainly use a bet calculator in order for you to find out what you could potentially win.