What Is a Double Chance Bet?

The ordinary football match market asks you to pick one of three results: a home win, a draw or an away win. Double chance turns that around and lets you pick two of them on a single bet. You are right more often, and in exchange you are paid less when you are right.

It is one of the simplest markets on a betting site, yet the labels can be confusing at first glance. This entry decodes them and explains how the bet is priced and settled.

The three combinations

Bookmakers usually show double chance with the same shorthand used in the match result market, where 1 means home, X means draw and 2 means away.

The 12 option is the least intuitive. It is effectively a bet that the match will not end level, which can appeal to someone expecting an open game without having a view on who will come out on top.

How the bet settles

Settlement is straightforward. If the final result is one of the two outcomes you covered, the bet wins at the quoted price. If it is the third outcome, the bet loses. There is no refund in double chance, which is the main difference from the draw no bet market, where a level score returns the stake. Our entry on draw no bet sets out that alternative in detail.

As with most football markets, the result normally means the score at the end of regular time, including stoppage time. Extra time and penalty shoot-outs are usually excluded unless the market name says otherwise.

Why the payout is small

Covering two results means the price reflects the combined chance of both. A double chance price is therefore always shorter than the price of either single result it includes. When one of the teams is a clear favourite, the 1X or X2 option on that side can pay very little, sometimes barely more than the stake.

The bookmaker's margin is still built in. Double chance does not offer better value than backing the individual results; it packages them differently. If you want to see how a price translates into an implied chance, and where the margin hides, our guide to odds in soccer betting walks through the method in general terms.

Common uses and misunderstandings

People tend to reach for double chance for a few reasons:

• Covering the draw. Someone who thinks an underdog can avoid defeat backs X2 or 1X rather than an outright win.
• Accumulator building. Short-priced double chance legs are added to combination tickets. This raises the number of things that must go right, and every extra leg adds the bookmaker's margin again.
• Feeling safer. Winning more often can feel like doing better. Hit rate and long-run result are not the same thing, and a market that wins often but pays little can still lose money over time.

That last point deserves emphasis. A bet that wins most weeks can create a sense of control, which makes it tempting to raise the stake. A single result outside your two choices then wipes out several small wins at once.

Double chance in other sports

The market only makes sense where a draw is a common outcome. Football is the obvious home for it, and some sites offer equivalents for ice hockey in regulation time, handball or certain rugby competitions. In tennis or basketball, where a winner is almost always produced, the concept does not apply.

Reading the slip carefully

Before confirming a double chance bet, it is worth checking three details on the slip:

1. That the label matches the two outcomes you intend to cover, especially on sites that list the away team first.
2. Which period of play the bet is settled on.
3. The potential return shown, so you know exactly what a winning result pays in money rather than in odds.

None of these steps changes the outcome of the match, but they avoid the frustrating kind of loss that comes from misreading a market.

In short

Double chance is a straightforward way of backing two results instead of one. It wins more often and pays less, and the operator's edge is present either way. Treat it as one more product on the menu, not as a shortcut. Sports betting is for people aged 18 or over and is regulated differently from one country to the next, so find out what is permitted where you live, and set your spending limit before the weekend's fixtures begin.