Success in sports betting is centered on reducing the risk of wagers; hence most betting strategies are bent on achieving this goal. Dutching betting is a common strategy where bettors share the risk of losing across multiple selections instead of one, thereby increasing their chances of winning.
As mentioned above, this technique reduces the risk of a wager. Even if only one of your selections wins, you can still turn out a profit. However, unlike arbitrage betting, Dutching doesn’t guarantee a profit, as you will lose your entire stake if all your selections lose.
While it’s easy to think Dutch betting came from the Netherlands, the concept originated from America. The term “Dutching” came from the name of a notorious American mobster, Arthur Flegenheimer, better known as Dutch Schultz.
In 1920, Schultz, who was AL Capone’s accountant, developed a technique that involved placing multiple wagers on different horses in the same race to get an edge over the bookmakers, minimizing his risk and increasing his chances of making a profit.
Although Flegenheimer met his cruel death at the hands of fellow mobsters in 1935, his legacy of Dutching in betting has evolved from its shady origins to become a legitimate and famous betting strategy a century later.
The basics of Dutching is simple: split your wagers on multiple outcomes in an event. However, the system won’t achieve its purpose if you don’t carefully calculate the stake on each bet such that all of them have equal potential returns. Below is an example of how the strategy works when Dutching horses.
Say you want to wager on a horse with six runners, and you want to back two horses to win at odds of 2.3 and 5.2. With a bankroll of $20, you might be tempted to split your stake into $10 each. However, this will mean that your risks are not evenly shared, and you may lose if the selection with the higher odds loses.
First, you need to calculate the implied probabilities from the odds of each selection.
The implied probability of the first horse winning:
After working out the implied probabilities, the next step is calculating how to divide your stake on the selections. A simple formula for this is (A / B) x C, where A is the implied probability of the relevant outcome, B is the total implied probability, and C is your total stake.
With proper calculations, you’ll realize that the potential return for each of these stakes is the same at $31.9. It fulfills the whole point of the Dutching strategy, which is to share the risks on a wager equally across more than one selection to increase your chances of winning.
There are many scenarios where Dutching can be the perfect way to go. For example, when competitive events have two or more selections with favorable odds, you can spread the risk across multiple choices to achieve a uniform return and profit. You can also consider it when you find that bookmakers’ implied probability of an outcome is lower than its actual probability. Dutching can be a valuable tactic to take advantage of the value in such bets.
Another time you can consider this strategy is when laying your bet at a betting exchange is impossible. When this happens, this option can be a perfect alternative to try out.
Check out scenarios where Dutching betting would be a handy replacement for lay bets.
The tennis sports market offers many opportunities for punters to engage in the Dutch betting strategy. With a wide variety of competitive tennis events taking place, you can get the chance to enjoy some impressive profit in the long run. However, one crucial fact you need to note is the tennis retirement rules.
In tennis, the retirement rules happen when a player gets forced to retire from a game due to injury or other circumstances. There are betting rules in place regarding such situations, which often vary from one sportsbook to another. When a player retires before the end of a tennis match, some bookmakers will void the bet and return the stake. Others may settle the bet with the result at retirement time.
Some punters see the Dutching strategy as an alternative form to lay betting as they both attempt to mitigate the risk involved in a bet. And in matched betting, the lay market is an essential component. However, unlike regular back bets, lay bets are not as widely available across sports and events. As such, there are limited options for lay betting, and this is where Dutching betting comes into play. You can always dutch your wagers with good markets and favorable odds across multiple sportsbooks.
Sadly, betting exchange services are not available to everyone worldwide. The dominant platforms like Betfair and Smarkets have a list of prohibited jurisdictions they don’t offer their services. So, lay bets would not be possible for punters residing in such countries.
The next best alternative, naturally, would be to engage the Dutch betting strategy. If you find bookmakers offering favorable odds, you can Dutch your bets to your advantage.
You can use the Dutching betting system on almost every online bookmaker. The strategy is also usable on most betting exchanges.
Below are popular sportsbooks where you can bet using the Dutching strategy:
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There are 3 main types of Dutching techniques, and we’ll cover them below, providing detailed examples for each.
It is the simplest type of Dutch betting where, depending on the odds, you keep the same stake for each selection or reduce them to keep the same profit. In the examples of this bet type below, your total stake is $20, and you are betting on two horses in a horse racing event.
Regardless of which horse wins, your profit is $20 ($40 return – $20 net stake)
Regardless of which horse wins, your profit will be $25 ($40 return – $15 net stake)
As the name implies, it is when the bettor targets a predetermined profit from a race or event, regardless of how many picks he makes. Therefore, the more selections added to the wager, the higher the stakes required. We will consider a potential target return of $30 for this example.
Regardless of which horse wins, your profit will be $30 ($50 return – £20.00 net stake)
Your targeted profit is still $30, but you added another selection. If your stake for each wager remains $10, your net profit for a winning piece will be $20. Therefore, you need to increase your stake for each selection to $15 to make your potential profit $30.
Regardless of which horse wins, your profit will be $30 ($75 return – $45 net stake)
Also referred to as stake-limited Dutching, set-amount Dutch betting is the opposite of the set-profit method discussed above. However, instead of increasing your stake as you add more selections, your stake is limited to a set amount in this technique, and your stakes are reduced as more choices are added. For the example below, we’ll consider a set stake limit of $20.
Regardless of which horse wins, your profit will be $26.67 ($46.67 return – $20 net stake)
You have increased your number of selections by one. However, your set amount remains $20, so your stake for each selection reduces.
Regardless of which horse wins, your profit will be $11.6 ($31.6 return – $20 net stake)
Please note that you don’t have to work out these calculations manually, as they can stress your brain. There are several free Dutch betting calculators online to help you. Also, it is advisable to convert the odds you are working with from fractional or American to decimal odds, as they are easier to work with.
Dutching was introduced into sports betting as a strategy to wager on horse and greyhound racing events. However, it has become popular across many other competitive sports today, including football, basketball, tennis, ice hockey, etc.
Let’s examine some of the most popular sports for the Dutching bet strategy.
Football offers one of the broadest betting market ranges, making it very popular with Dutching. One of the popular betting options when Dutching soccer includes the 1X2. If you believe the chances of a team losing a match are slim, you can get Dutch your wages on “win” and “draw” selections simultaneously, effectively sharing your risks across both options.
Correct scores are another popular market you can wager on when placing Dutching bets. You can spread your stakes across more than one valid score selection. You can also wager on both teams to score.
The Dutching betting system is also popular in tennis, basketball, and ice hockey. However, you need to know the betting markets that work with this technique for each sport, like football. It would help if you also used a bookmaker with various betting markets.
The Dutching bet system was created for horse and greyhound racing. All you need to do is pick the horses with the highest possibility of winning a race and spread your wagers on them. Three selections are the most common bet type when Dutching horses. However, it is essential to only wager on up to 4 horses.
There are 4 main Dutching strategies and systems, and we’ll cover them in detail below.
Each-way betting involves splitting your wagers into 2 equal parts. The first part of your stake is the “Win” bet, which requires your selection to win in a sports event like a horse race. The second part of your stake is the “Place” bet, which requires your choice to finish among one of the predetermined positions.
Some people use each-way Dutching interchangeably with arbing, but they are entirely different concepts. Arbing, arbitrage betting, involves betting on all the possibilities involved in a sports event with other bookmakers. The technique exploits odds discrepancies between multiple sportsbooks to ensure profit is guaranteed no matter the outcome of the wagers, unlike Dutching.
Extra Place betting is common in horse racing, golf, and other sports events. Bookmakers offer an additional place on top of the usual number of places paid out for each-way bets. For instance, if the standard top finishing market is top 3, a bookmaker can pay 4 or 5 places, adding one or two extra slots.
When used in each-way Dutching, this promotion helps bettors to get paid on places for more selections.
The 2Up promotion, known as the early payout offer, is among the best offers in Dutching matched betting. It is important to note that this offer is most common in football betting and is only available on select sportsbooks like Bet365 and Paddy Power.
As the name implies, the 2-up offer pays out returns when the team you back to win a match is two goals up, settling your wagers as though the game is over. This offer can be advantageous when Dutching soccer. By placing a back stake for a team at a bookmaker and laying the same team in the same event at a Dutching betting exchange, you can reduce your risks significantly and generate above-average payouts if both wagers pan out.
Although it may sound complicated, reverse Dutching is simple. Instead of supporting multiple picks to win like in the regular Dutching betting strategy, this technique requires laying multiple selections at betting exchanges like Betfair. The aim remains the same; to increase your chances of winning by spreading your risks across different picks.
As mentioned, the ultimate aim of implementing the Dutching strategy is to reduce risk. However, this doesn’t guarantee you will win, as your predictions may be wrong. It only means that you will earn a profit if at least one of your selections wins, but you can also lose your entire stake if none does. It is, however, not the case for arbitrage Dutching, which is a strategy that guarantees that a punter will earn a profit regardless of the outcomes of an event.
Like any other betting strategy, there is a math behind arbitrage Dutching. While it may look complicated to most punters, especially newbies, this is relatively simple. The key is finding discrepancies between different bookmakers’ odds on all selections within a specific market. Typically when converted to their implied probability, these odds are expected to be greater than 100% since bookmakers typically add vigorish (%commission) to their odds. So, whenever you find a market where the implied probability of all its possible outcomes is less than 100%, there is an opportunity for arbitrage Dutching.
There is an upcoming tennis game between Carlos Alcaraz and Taylor Fritz. When shopping for lines, we discovered that Sportsbook A offers 1.35 odds on Carlos Alcaraz’s victory while Sportsbook B offers 4.54 odds on Taylor Fritz’s. Let’s check if it meets our arb Dutching criteria.
| Odds | Conversion | Implied probability | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Carlos Alcaraz @ Sportsbook A | 1.35 | (100 ÷ 1.35) = | 74.07% |
| Taylor Fritz @ Sportsbook B | 4.54 | (100 ÷ 4.54) = | 22.02% |
| Total | 96.09% |
As you can see from the table, the total percentage of the bet is less than 100%. With the right stakes, the remaining 3.91% leaves room for arbitrage Dutching opportunities.
To get the most out of your arbitrage Dutching bet, you must place the right stakes on each outcome to get the maximum possible profit regardless of what happens in the event. Thankfully, punters can use various arbitrage calculators for convenient Dutching staking online. These calculators tend to help punters determine the correct stake amount by choosing between three different targets – the first selection, the total stake, and the overall profit. Now, let’s see how this works.
The “First Selection” setting option allows punters to decide the amount they want to stake on the first selection. The amount you enter here will stay the same no matter how many selections you want to Dutch or the odds offered on them. Based on this, the calculator will compute the stake amounts you need to use for all the other selections to ensure a uniform profit across the board. It is a good choice when you know which selection will most likely win.
Let’s look at an example with three selections with odds of 2.00, 5.00, and 10.00, respectively. Once we set the stake amount of the first selection as $20, the calculator will automatically compute for the other selections, as seen in the table below.
| Selections | Odds | Stake | Return | Profit | Losing Stakes | Profit/Loss |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2.00 | $20.00 | $40.00 | $20.00 | -$8.00 – $4.00 | $8.00 |
| 2 | 5.00 | $8.00 | $40.00 | $32.00 | -$20.00 – $4.00 | $8.00 |
| 3 | 10.00 | $4.00 | $40.00 | $36.00 | – $20.00 -$8.00 | $8.00 |
Once you fix the first selection bet, the calculator will automatically compute the necessary stake to guarantee a uniform profit of $8, regardless of the outcome. Here, the higher the first selection’s wager, the higher the combined stake the market will require.
The “Total Stake” setting option allows punters to specify how much to wager across all the selections on an arb Dutching market. This amount will stay the same regardless of how many selections are involved or the odds offered. The calculator will then compute the stakes to wager on each selection to guarantee a profit.
The table below shows an example that features the same three selection odds we checked out above using a $20 total stake amount.
| Selections | Odds | Stake | Return | Profit | Losing Stakes | Profit/Loss |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2.00 | $12.50 | $25.00 | $12.50 | -$5.00- $2.50 | $5.00 |
| 2 | 5.00 | $5.00 | $25.00 | $20.00 | -$12.50 – $2.50 | $5.00 |
| 3 | 10.00 | $2.50 | $25.00 | $22.50 | -$12.50 -$5.00 | $5.00 |
Based on the $20 total staked amount computed specified and the available odds, the software will calculate how much money must be wagered on each selection to guarantee a $5.00 uniform profit, regardless of the outcome.
Another setting that punters can opt-in for when deciding the suitable bet amount for their arbitrage Dutching betting is the overall profit. It allows you to target the profit you wish to make on the market, regardless of the eventual outcome. The Dutching calculator computes the stakes to wager each selection based on the available odds to achieve the desired profit amount.
Let’s see how this can work using $20 as the targeted overall profit amount and the selections used in the previous two examples to get one of the best sportsbook payouts.
| Selections | Odds | Stake | Return | Profit | Losing Stakes | Profit/Loss |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2.00 | $50.00 | $100.00 | $50.00 | -$20.00 – $10.00 | $20.00 |
| 2 | 5.00 | $20.00 | $100.00 | $80.00 | -$50.00 – $10.00 | $20.00 |
| 3 | 10.00 | $10.00 | $100.00 | $900.00 | -$50.00 -$20.00 | $20.00 |
Based on the specified profit amount, the table shows the bets a punter would have to place in this scenario.
Betting Dutching helps to significantly reduce losses by sharing risks across multiple selections. However, it doesn’t guarantee a profit, and things can go south with a simple error. Therefore, we have provided helpful Dutching betting tips in this section to ensure the strategy yields effective results.
As discussed above, you can’t apply the Dutching betting method to every existing sport, as some lack the markets required that work with the strategy. So you need to ensure you pick the right games to use the system successfully.
Game analysis is essential in the Dutching betting strategy as it helps you consider crucial factors needed to make accurate picks. However, it is not the only decisive factor for success in the technique.
Other essential factors influencing your Dutch wagers include the markets you are betting on and the odds of your selections.
Opening accounts with multiple bookmakers is another essential basic of Dutching that can aid success. It allows you to compare the odds different betting sites offer and select the best ones for your Dutch wagers. This tip also applies to sports betting in general.
Also, some sportsbooks offer a wider range of betting markets than others, and having multiple accounts gives you more options when using the Dutching bet strategy.
Bookmakers usually vary in their features, from betting options and markets to odds, and one of the best ways to get the best out of sports betting is by comparing what each site offers to choose the best ones.
Comparing the odds different bookmakers offer before placing your Dutching bets will help you maximize your potential winnings, giving you the best returns for each wager.
The main idea of Dutching is to share the risk of your wager between different selections such that you get the same return regardless of which one wins. However, if your bet is not optimally balanced, you can sustain significant losses with the parts of your wager that loses even if you win one of your selections.
Therefore, using a Dutching calculator to calculate how much to stake on each selection depending on their odds is essential to ensure that the risk is evenly shared and that you’ll profit if one of your picks wins.
Dutching is centered on risk management if it is appropriately applied. The strategy can increase your chances of winning your wagers up to 50% by wagering on multiple picks.
However, as really skilled bettors, you must ensure your calculation regarding how much of your stake to wager on each selection must be 100% accurate to avoid nasty surprises. It would also help to stick to the sports and events you are familiar with.
While they are similar in some ways, Dutching and double-chance betting are different concepts. Double-chance betting involves betting on two outcomes in an event. For instance, instead of being limited to a “home win,” “draw,” or “away win” in a football 1X2 bet, you can combine “home win or draw,” “away win or draw,” or “home win and away win.” A Dutch bet will also serve the same purpose in this scenario.
It is a general tip for sports betting. Taking advantage of bonuses and promotions allows you to place more wagers with lesser risks to your bankroll, maximizing your chances of winning. For instance, Dutching in matched betting allows bettors to lock in substantial profits using the free bets offered by sportsbooks.
Additionally, looking for sportsbooks with the best bonus and promo offers is essential to increase your success rate using the strategy.
Dutching correct scores is popular in sports like football, basketball, hockey, etc. Instead of having the option only to predict one correct score, the system allows you to spread your wagers across multiple proper score selections.
Do not guess or pick common scores. However, selecting your multiple picks from in-depth research on how the event will turn out is essential. You must also calculate the correct amount to stake on each pick carefully using their odds to ensure there is potential for a return.
After picking multiple correct scores in your Dutch wager, add the Both Teams To Score (BTTS) selection to increase your chances of winning.
With this Dutch betting style, here is an example of how your bet slip will look like:
Dutching Correct Scores & Over 1.5 Goals allows you to add the over 1.5 goals pick to your correct score selections. It comes in handy in increasing your chances of winning if both teams are evenly matched and likely to score multiple goals.
This bet is straightforward. You need to pick multiple selections of teams that are likely to win a league or tournament in an outright bet. However, you must be careful to ensure that the implied odds of all your picks are less than 100%, as Dutching will not be successful otherwise.
Dutching on numerous sports is not advisable as you may not have adequate knowledge to make accurate selections. Moreso, some sports don’t have bet types for Dutching.
Therefore, focusing on and devoting yourself to a sport is better. By doing this, you will make more accurate selections and get better with the strategy. As mentioned previously, football, horse racing, and greyhound racing are some of the best options for the technique.
Dutching involves balancing the risk of your wager across multiple selections to ensure you get the same potential return regardless of which one wins. Correct calculations require you to stake the right amount on each pick. Therefore, you should often consider 2-way bets as they only cover two outcomes, making your calculations easier.
However, note that it is always better to use a Dutching calculator to avoid stress and errors, regardless of what style of Dutching you are betting on.
Rather than placing Dutch wagers across every available bet type, It’s advisable to stick with the markets you understand when using the strategy. It will increase your chances of making accurate selections to win Dutching wagers more and make calculations easier.
Besides understanding the market you place a Dutch bet on, you must also target bet types with a high return rate. It ensures significant returns, helping you make a considerable profit even after deducting the stakes for your lost selections.
As you might have already inferred, Dutching betting requires calculating the odds to target and the stake to wager on the selections. This calculation can be challenging to do manually, so there are quite a few Dutching calculators to help punters.
Manually calculating your bets for successful Dutching can be tasking and sometimes complicated. Also, a simple calculation error can set you up for significant losses even if one of your selections wins. Therefore, it is advisable to use free online Dutching calculation tools for convenience and accuracy.
While it is possible to wager on multiple selections in Dutching, keeping the number as minimum as possible is advisable. It is because the higher the number of your picks, the lesser your potential returns get, except if you want to keep raising your total stake amount. Also, an increased number of selections often require complicated calculations.
Dutching has grown popular as a technique to mitigate risks and increase bettors’ chances of winning in the sports betting world. However, like any other strategy, it has both advantages and letdowns.
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Dutching is an ideal betting technique for bettors looking to reduce the risk of their wagers and increase their chances of winning. However, whether the strategy is worth it depends on certain factors, as it doesn’t guarantee profit.
First, one of your selections must win; otherwise, you will lose your total stake. Therefore, you need to have an in-depth understanding of the sport and event you are betting on. Also, it would help if you considered the odds offered by the different sportsbooks to choose the one with the best potential return.
Following the information and the best Dutching bet strategies in this comprehensive guide, you’ll understand everything you need to use the system successfully.
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