Double Chance Meaning: What It Costs, and When Our Own Record Says It Pays

Double chance is a single bet that covers two of the three possible results in a football match, so it wins if either of them comes in. There are three versions: 1X backs the home team or the draw, X2 backs the away team or the draw, and 12 backs either team to win with the draw as the only losing result. You pay for that cover with a much shorter price. The question is never whether double chance is safer, it obviously is. The question is whether the shorter price is worth it, and that depends entirely on how often your picks finish level. Ours finish level a lot, and this article shows exactly how often, using our published record of 134 graded predictions.

The three double chance bets

On Betway and the other South African books it usually sits in its own market rather than inside the main 1X2 list, sometimes labelled double chance and sometimes just 1X, X2, 12. It settles on 90 minutes plus stoppage time. Extra time and penalties in a cup tie do not count unless the market explicitly says so, which catches people out in knockout football every single season.

What double chance actually costs

The arithmetic is not complicated and it is the whole argument. Any price implies a break-even strike rate, and that break-even is simply one divided by the odds.

At 1.80 you need to be right 55.6% of the time to break even. At 1.15 you need to be right 87% of the time. Shortening the price from 1.80 to 1.15 does not make you safer in profit terms. It raises the bar you have to clear by more than thirty percentage points. Double chance is only worth taking when your real hit rate on those two outcomes clears the new bar by more than it cleared the old one.

Almost nobody checks this, because almost nobody publishes a graded record you could check it against. We do.

What our own 134 picks say

Our public record stands at 79 wins from 134 graded picks, 59%. We grade a draw as a loss, because we pick a winner and a draw means we did not get one. That rule is harsh, and it is exactly why this analysis is possible: every draw is sitting in our loss column where we can count it.

So here is the table that matters. The left half is our record as published. The right half is the same picks re-settled as if each had been a double chance bet on our pick plus the draw. The final column is the minimum price a book would have had to offer for that to have shown a profit.

That last row is the one to carry away. Across everything we have published, a double chance on our pick would have landed 110 times in 134. Any 1X or X2 price above 1.22 would have shown a profit. Anything at or below 1.22 would not have.

The result we did not expect

Common sense says double chance is for shaky picks. Our data says close to the opposite, and it is the most interesting thing in this record.

We have lost only three strong picks in the entire history of the board.

Two of those three were draws, not defeats. Re-settled as double chance, our strong band goes from 19-3 to 21-1, from 86% to 95%. When we are most confident and still wrong, we are usually wrong in the one way double chance protects against. Our low-confidence picks lose more often by genuinely naming the wrong winner, which double chance cannot save. Twenty-two picks is a small sample and we are not going to dress it up as a law of nature, but it is the opposite of the received wisdom and it is what the record says.

Double chance or draw no bet

These two markets solve the same problem in different ways, and choosing between them is a real decision rather than a preference.

Draw no bet gives your money back on a draw. Double chance turns the draw into a small win, and charges you more up front for the privilege. Our position, based on the table above, is that double chance earns its price when the draw is the likely failure mode, and draw no bet is the better instrument when you simply want to cut variance without paying for a profit you did not really earn. We went through the draw side of this in detail in draw no bet, explained, built on an earlier and smaller version of this same dataset.

When we would use it, and when we would not

• Use it when the price on your pick plus the draw beats the break-even for that confidence band, and not before. Above 1.22 across the board, above 1.26 on a good or close pick, above 1.05 on a strong one.
• Use it in competitions where our record is weakest. Our Premier League record is 9W-11L and our Betway Premiership record is 6W-7L, both leagues where the draw is a live outcome in most fixtures.
• Do not use it as a way to bet on matches you would otherwise skip. Covering two outcomes on a fixture you have no read on is still a bet with no edge, just a quieter one.
• Do not use it to build long accumulators. Stacking six short prices to manufacture a big number is where the shorter odds stop protecting you and start working for the book.
• Do not assume the 12 version is the safe one. It loses on every single draw, and 31 of our 55 losses were draws.

The part most explainers leave out

Double chance does not improve your judgement. It changes the shape of your results: more small wins, fewer losing weeks, a lower ceiling. If your underlying picks have no edge, double chance converts a fast loss into a slow one, and the slower loss is harder to notice. That is its real danger.

The only thing that tells you whether it is working is a record kept honestly, draws counted as losses, bad rounds published alongside the good ones. Ours sits at the top of every page and includes rounds like the one where our accuracy fell to 57%. If a tipster will not show you theirs, no market on the coupon fixes that.

Written by Carlson Dze Meh. Every figure here is drawn from our own published graded record of 134 predictions, current to 21 September 2026. Break-even odds are calculated as one divided by the strike rate, rounded to two decimals.