Bookmakers love accumulators. The more options someone has in their bet, the less likely it is to be a winner. Of course, not everyone loves placing accumulators, perhaps being confused by the number of choices or simply not sure how they work. There is also the fact that accas don’t allow you to include related contingencies. As a result, bookies offer their own version of a Bet Builder, which is essentially a way of putting together numerous different options within an event in order to make an accumulator-like bet that can also feature related contingencies, thereby helping punters narrow down their options.
Bet Builders Explained
As you might well be able to infer from the name, a Bet Builder is a type of football bet that allows you to combine multiple markets from a game that you’re betting on into one wage. Each bookmaker has their own version of a Bet Builder, so it might have a different name when you look on the site of your chosen bookie, but the idea remains the same. Each bookie will also have their own rules and regulations on how many legs you can add into your Bet Builder, with some limiting it to five, say, whilst others will allow up to eight and some might permit you to go up to as many as 12 different selections in your Bet Builder.
The bookmaker chooses which markets it will allow in a Bet Builder, meaning that you don’t need to worry about what to look for as they will put all of the available markets in the same place under the Bet Builder tab. You then choose which of them you’d like to add to your selection, with the odds likely to lengthen each time you add something to your Bet Builder. You then place the bet, with the requirement being that all of your selections come in in order for your bet to be a winning one and for you to get paid out on it by the bookie. If any of them don’t happen then it won’t be a winning bet.
Example Bet Builder Markets
In the 2023-2024 campaign, West Ham United played Leverkusen in the Europa League. In the second-leg, one bookmaker offered a Bet Builder and the following is a selection of the markets available for it:
- Player to Commit 1 or More Fouls
- Player to Have 1 or More Shots on Target
- Player to be Shown a Card
- Qualify for the Next Round
- To Score or Assist
- Correct Score
- Both Teams to Score Market
- Team to Receive the Most Cards
- Team Shots on Target
- Double Chance
As you can see, there are a wealth of different options available for your Bet Builder, with many more markets besides also available. The more that you add to your bet, the more the odds will increase but the likelihood of it being a winner will decrease. Here is a look at how that changes with each bet, presuming that we added each of the above legs to our bet:
| New Thing Added to Bet Builder | Odds | Overall Bet Builder Odds |
|---|---|---|
| Edson Alvarez to Commit 1 or More Fouls | 1/4 | 1/4 |
| Victor Boniface to Have 1 or More Shots on Target | 2/9 | 0.61/1 |
| Konstantinos Mavropanos to be Shown a Card | 2/1 | 3.98/1 |
| Leverkusen to Qualify for Next Round | 1/50 | 4.21/1 |
| Patrik Schick to Score or Assist | 4/6 | 7.62/1 |
| Correct Score of 3-1 | 22/1 | 327.54/1 |
| Both Teams to Score – Yes | 6/10 | 327.52/1 |
| West Ham to Receive the Most Cards | 5/4 | 435.95/1 |
| Leverkusen to Have 4 or More Shots on Target | 2/5 | 442.28/1 |
| Leverkusen & West Ham Double Chance | 2/9 | 442.26/1 |
Obviously we added those things at random, but you can see that some of them actually saw the odds reduce rather than increase. In that instance, there wouldn’t have been any point in us adding them to the betting slip, given the fact that the odds on offer dropped but the likelihood of his winning the bet decreased. In fact, when we removed Both Teams to Score – Yes and Leverkusen & West Ham Double Chance from the slip, the odds increased to 442.34/1. That is the sort of thing that it is worth looking out for when you do your own Bet Builder.