When you place a bet, you obviously think that you have a reasonable chance of winning it. After all, you’re unlikely to spend money placing a bet that you know is going to be a loser. Instead, you’re thinking that you’ve got a chance of seeing at least some sort of return on your stake, which is why you’ve gone ahead and placed the bet.
The problem is, it might not be all that clear how much you stand to win from your bet. This is especially the case when you bear in mind that you might choose to place different stakes on bets with odds of 20/1, so we’ll explain all here.
Payouts
How much you’ll be paid on a straight Win bet with odds of 20/1 will be dictated by what the size of your stake is. Though you’re likely to pick all sorts of different stakes depending on how much money you have in your bank roll, which we obviously can’t predict, what we can do is look at a set amount of stakes that you can then use to infer how much you’d win from your own chosen stake.
We have picked a series of different stakes for this exact reason, with the following giving you a sense of how much you’d win and what your profit would be for each amount:
| Stake Amount | Payout | Profit |
|---|---|---|
| £1 | £21 | £20 |
| £2 | £42 | £40 |
| £5 | £105 | £100 |
| £10 | £210 | £200 |
| £25 | £525 | £500 |
| £50 | £1,050 | £1,000 |
| £100 | £2,100 | £2,000 |
Each-Way Payout
Whilst it is simple enough to figure out the profit that you’d make from a bet on a selection with odds of 20/1 by just taking the stake off your winnings, things become a touch more complex when you start to think about the likes of Each-Way bets. This is further complicated by the fact that an Each-Way bet is actually two separate wagers packaged into one.
As a result, your stake is doubled as you place a Win bet and a Place bet. The Place bet is normally paid out at a reduced amount on your odds, with many bookmakers paying out at 1/4 of the odds. Here is a look at what you’d be paid out according to whether your horse won the race or was placed, breaking it down by each stake amount:
| Each-Way Stake Amount | Total Bet | Win Payout | Place Payout |
|---|---|---|---|
| £1 | £2 | £27 | £6 |
| £2 | £4 | £54 | £12 |
| £5 | £10 | £135 | £30 |
| £10 | £20 | £270 | £60 |
| £25 | £50 | £675 | £150 |
| £50 | £100 | £1,350 | £300 |
| £100 | £200 | £2,700 | £600 |
Examples
If you’re placing a bet on a wager with odds of 20/1, you’re likely to be aware of the fact that you’re unlikely to be backing a winner. The reality is that if bookmakers are giving a selection such long odds then they don’t really fancy its chances. Of course, just because something has long odds doesn’t mean that it has no chance of winning. There have been any number of sporting successes that have happened with odds even long than 20/1, so it should come as no surprise that there have also been some winners with exactly those odds.
If you want to see examples of a winner with odds of 20/1, there are few better races to look at than the Grand National. That isn’t because the ‘World’s Greatest Steeplechase’ is regularly won by horses with such odds, but rather because the challenging nature of the race means that there are horses of vastly different odds that have won it over the years. In fact, those with odds of 20/1 won it on no fewer than 11 occasions between the first running of the event and the 2022 Aintree Racecourse meeting. Here is a look at the ones that managed it with those odds:
| Year | Horse | Age |
|---|---|---|
| 1849 | Peter Simple | 11 |
| 1872 | Casse Tete | 7 |
| 1873 | Disturbance | 6 |
| 1887 | Gamecock | 8 |
| 1892 | Father O’Flynn | 7 |
| 1902 | Shannon Lass | 7 |
| 1906 | Ascetic’s Silver | 9 |
| 1911 | Glenside | 9 |
| 1953 | Early Mist | 8 |
| 1957 | Sundew | 11 |
| 2002 | Bindaree | 8 |
Though a horse with odds of 20/1 won the Grand National every few years during the race’s more formative years, there was a huge gap between the 1957 win of Sundew and the 2002 victory for Bindaree, with no horse having won it in the 20 years that followed having those odds.