What Are the Odds of Winning the Football Pools?
Winning the football pools on a regular basis seems like a dream (or pure fancy) to many people. It can be done though, if you have a system. How can you work the odds? It’s a question that a lot of people ask! Let’s look at the basic odds. With a coupon of 49 matches (games), we are looking to identify a winning line of 8 score draws on the British treble chance pools if we are to win a 1st Dividend (a score draw or SD is a result in which both teams end up with the same number of goals, not zero). If we stake on 1 line only (nobody does, but leave that aside for now), then the odds of selecting the correct 8 matches from 49 are approximately 450 million to 1. With the UK lottery the odds are 14 million to 1 for a six number combination, by comparison. If we stake 45,000 lines in an entry, then that reduces the odds (on a purely random basis), to about 10,000 to 1. That’s getting a whole lot better. Now, there are complications. There will not always be 8 SD results on a given coupon,
