What is a goliath bet and what does it cost?

Updated October 2026

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A Goliath is a full cover bet built from eight selections, and it contains 247 individual bets across every possible combination of two or more of those picks. Twenty-eight doubles, fifty-six trebles, seventy four-folds, fifty-six five-folds, twenty-eight six-folds, eight seven-folds, and the single eight-fold accumulator that ties every leg together. Each line is settled on its own, so a Goliath is really a package of 247 separate wagers priced by the same unit stake and paid out as if each had been struck alone. That structure is what makes it expensive to play and what makes the headline odds misleading. A Goliath is not “an accumulator at bigger odds”. It is 247 accumulators priced at the bookmaker’s margin, where every leg has to win for the headline price to land and a single losing leg still pays out through whichever other combinations that selection was part of.

This page is written for UK readers who want to understand the bet before placing one, or who have seen a Goliath offered on a betting slip and want to know what they are looking at. Everything that follows is set against a UK Gambling Commission licence check current as of 27 October 2026, with odds and markets checked against each operator’s own published terms.

The Goliath sits inside a wider family of full cover bets

The Goliath is the top of a ladder of pre-built combination bets that bookmakers offer on their coupons, and understanding the family is the easiest way to understand where the 247 comes from. A full cover bet is the term for any wager that covers every possible combination of a stated number of selections, taken two at a time or more. The smaller versions are cheaper to play and settle the same way; the larger versions are the same idea with more legs and many more lines.

A Trixie takes three selections and produces four bets: three doubles and one treble. A Yankee takes four selections and produces eleven bets: six doubles, four trebles and one four-fold accumulator. A Canadian, also called a Super Yankee, takes five selections and produces twenty-six bets. A Heinz takes six selections and produces fifty-seven bets. The Lucky 15, Lucky 31 and Lucky 63 are a separate branch: they include singles on top of every multiple, so a Lucky 15 covers four selections in fifteen bets rather than eleven. A Super Heinz takes seven selections and produces one hundred and twenty bets. The Goliath takes eight selections and produces two hundred and forty-seven bets. Each step up the ladder adds every combination of one more selection to every existing combination, which is why the line count grows so quickly.

The point of naming the family is not encyclopaedic. It is that every full cover bet is settled the same way. Each combination is treated as its own bet, the stake you enter is the unit stake per line, and your total stake is the unit stake multiplied by the line count. A £1 Goliath costs £247 to place. A 10p Goliath costs £24.70. That arithmetic is the first cost of the bet and the one most punters underweight when they look at the coupon.

How a Goliath is built, line by line

With eight selections, labelled A through H, the full set of combinations runs as follows. There are twenty-eight doubles, which is every pairing of two letters from A to H: AB, AC, AD, AE, AF, AG, AH, BC, BD, BE, BF, BG, BH, CD, CE, CF, CG, CH, DE, DF, DG, DH, EF, EG, EH, FG, FH and GH. There are fifty-six trebles, every group of three. There are seventy four-folds, every group of four. There are fifty-six five-folds, twenty-eight six-folds, eight seven-folds and the single eight-fold that uses every selection. Adding those up gives 28 + 56 + 70 + 56 + 28 + 8 + 1 = 247. That is the bet. There is no singles line, because the Goliath is a multiples-only full cover.

Each line is priced independently from the odds of its selections at the time of bet placement. Take selection A at 2.00 and B at 3.00: the double AB settles at 6.00, the treble ABC at 2.00 × 3.00 × whatever C is priced at, and so on up the chain. The bookmaker’s margin sits inside each price, just as it does on any single selection, and the Goliath inherits that margin on every one of its 247 lines.

Settling a Goliath: what wins, what pays, what dies

A Goliath pays out whenever any combination of two or more selections wins. A single losing selection kills every line that includes it, but every line that does not include it lives on. If seven selections win and one loses, every line that does not include the loser settles, which means the punter still collects on 246 of the 247 bets in the package. The single dead bet is whichever combination happens to require the missing leg, and at least one such combination exists in every category from the doubles up.

If only one selection wins, the Goliath returns nothing. There is no singles line, and the bet’s smallest unit is the double. The payout structure means that a Goliath is essentially a “miss one and you still get paid” instrument, but only barely. Missing two selections out of eight already destroys most of the lines: every double that needs one of the two missing legs is dead, every treble that needs both is dead, and the package collapses quickly once losses stack up. A Goliath that needs all eight to win pays the headline price; a Goliath with one loser still pays out on most lines but at a fraction of that headline; a Goliath with two losers usually returns less than the total stake.

That sliding scale is what makes the bet interesting and what makes it dangerous. It is not the all-or-nothing instrument that a plain accumulator is. It is a portfolio of 247 wagers, and the punter is exposed to the margin on every one of them.

What the bookmaker’s margin does to a Goliath

Every price carries the bookmaker’s overround, which is the difference between 100% and the sum of the implied probabilities of all outcomes. The wider the overround, the more the bookmaker keeps of every pound staked. On a 1X2 football market with three outcomes, a margin of 5% means the implied probabilities sum to 105%; on a two-outcome market, the same margin sums to 102.5%. The Goliath inherits this margin on every one of its 247 lines, so the punter is paying the bookmaker’s cut many times over in a single bet.

A worked example makes this concrete. Take three illustrative selections at odds of 1/2 (1.50), evens (2.00) and 6/4 (2.50). For an accumulator that ties all three together, the price is 1.50 × 2.00 × 2.50 = 7.50, so a £10 stake returns £75 if all three win. The net profit is £65. For a full-cover bet on the same three selections, which is a Trixie with four lines, the unit stake of £2 per line costs £8 in total, and the four combinations settle independently at their own multiplied prices. Doubles pay 1.50 × 2.00 = 3.00, 1.50 × 2.50 = 3.75 and 2.00 × 2.50 = 5.00, while the treble pays 7.50. The result is a band of payouts ranging from a £6 return on the smallest double up to a £15 return on the treble, with the total return across all four lines landing in the £30 to £45 range depending on which legs win. The headline treble price is 7.50 in both cases; the Trixie just gives the punter four shots at it instead of one.

Extending the same logic to eight selections produces the Goliath’s 247 lines and the same per-line margin cost repeated 247 times. A punter who wants exposure to the “all eight win” payout can buy it more efficiently through a single accumulator at £10. A punter who buys the same exposure through a Goliath at 10p per line is paying 247 × 10p = £24.70 to chase it, and the bulk of that stake is going to fund lines the punter did not actually want. The bet is a package, and the package is priced as a package, which means the punter pays for the convenience of not having to build the package themselves.

Stake sizing, total cost and the unit stake trap

The unit stake on a Goliath is the amount entered on the betting slip as the stake. The total stake is that figure multiplied by 247. A £1 Goliath costs £247; a 50p Goliath costs £123.50; a 10p Goliath costs £24.70. Bookmakers usually default to a unit stake that produces a manageable total, and many will let the punter enter either the unit stake or the total stake and divide accordingly. The important number for budgeting is the total stake, because that is the amount debited from the account when the bet is placed and the figure the punter has to win back before the bet is in profit.

A common pitfall is to treat the headline price — the eight-fold accumulator price that ties all eight selections together — as the bet’s expected return. It is not. The headline price is the return on 1/247th of the total stake if every selection wins. The other 246/247ths of the stake is distributed across the other 246 lines, each of which has its own much smaller payout when only some of the selections win. The total return at “all eight win” is the unit stake multiplied by the eight-fold price; the total return at “seven win, one loses” is the unit stake multiplied by the sum of the prices of every line that does not include the loser; the total return at “one wins” is zero.

Each-way and free bet considerations

A Goliath can be placed each-way in the same way any multiple bet can, although the structure makes each-way less natural than it is on horse racing singles. Each-way doubles the unit stake on every line, because each-way is two bets of equal stake — one on the win, one on the place — and applies place terms to each line independently. For eight football selections with each-way fractions, the total stake doubles, the place portion of every line pays out at the place fraction of the line’s full price, and the win portion pays only on lines that win outright.

Free bets are a separate question. Most bookmakers’ free bet tokens settle as a single bet credit rather than as a package of credits, and the stake is usually not returned with a winning free bet. That means a free bet placed as a Goliath unit stake works, but the punter forfeits 246/247ths of the unit stake as soon as the bet is struck, because the free bet amount is consumed once across the whole package. The value of the free bet is calculated as the stake multiplied by (odds − 1) divided by odds, scaled by the payout share of the market. For a £10 free bet at decimal odds of 7.50, that is 10 × (7.50 − 1) / 7.50 = £8.67 if every selection wins, less the bookmaker’s margin. For any other combination of winners, the value is much smaller. The free bet pays its headline number only on the all-eight-win scenario, which is the least likely outcome the bet produces.

Comparing the Goliath to its smaller siblings

The trade-off between the Goliath and its family members is a question of how much coverage the punter wants for how much stake. A Trixie on three selections costs 4 × unit stake and offers four payout scenarios; a Yankee on four costs 11 × unit stake and offers everything from doubles up; a Lucky 15 on four costs 15 × unit stake and adds singles; a Canadian on five costs 26 × unit stake; a Heinz on six costs 57 × unit stake; a Super Heinz on seven costs 120 × unit stake; and the Goliath on eight costs 247 × unit stake. Each step adds every combination of one more selection, which adds many more lines and pushes the total stake up faster than the punter’s intuition usually predicts.

The right bet depends on how confident the punter is in each selection. A punter who strongly fancies three of the eight and treats the other five as support legs is paying 247 lines for exposure to those three as combinations. A punter who fancies all eight equally is paying 247 lines for the full coverage and the headline price. The cost difference is enormous and the payout difference between “all eight win” and “any seven win” is small relative to the headline, which is why serious punters tend to prefer either a plain accumulator or a Lucky 15 over a Goliath unless they specifically want the seven-of-eight coverage.

The 10 reviewed bookmakers and what each offers on full cover bets

Ten UK bookmakers hold a Gambling Commission remote general betting standard licence and offer full cover bets including the Goliath. They are listed below in the order they appear on the Commission’s public register against the operator set covered here, with the licence number, the licence holder and what the operator’s own terms state on the bet types and odds at the heart of this comparison. The licence is the legal frame; the table is the comparison the punter actually reads.

The licence column tells the punter who is regulated and under what category; the terms column tells the punter what each brand actually does differently. Every brand above offers the Goliath as a coupon selection, because full cover bets are standard market-maker output, and the differences between them show up in pricing, in horse-racing concessions and in the welcome offers that fund a first bet. Welcome offers are described above by what they pay out, not by how to claim them. Every free bet token carries a minimum price and a deadline; every offer carries its own terms, and the punter reads those terms before staking anything.

Verdict on the operator set

The right brand for a Goliath is not the brand with the biggest welcome offer or the most famous name. It is the brand whose price on each leg of the Goliath is tightest, because the Goliath inherits the margin on every one of its 247 lines and a small price difference on each leg compounds across the package. Fafabet and Octobet both publish Best Odds Guaranteed on UK and Irish horse racing, which matters when a Goliath leg is a horse race and the starting price drifts; Betway and Unibet price a deeper sportsbook across football and tennis, where most Goliath legs sit; Midnite’s price boosts and acca builder appeal to a punter who wants to combine legs from the same fixture. Sporting Index is the only spread-betting brand in the set, and its offer is structured around fixed-odds and spread legs together, which is a different product. DAZN Bet leans on cash-out and bet builder; BetMGM splits its free bets into accumulator and multiples formats, which suits Goliath-style betting naturally; Fitzwilliam bases its prices on an average market price, which can mean tighter lines on some selections and looser on others. The punter picks the brand that prices the specific legs the punter wants, not the brand with the flashiest headline.

What a Goliath costs the punter in plain numbers

The arithmetic is straightforward once the unit stake is chosen, and the worked example below uses illustrative odds and stakes that any punter can adjust. Three illustrative selections at odds of 1/2 (1.50), evens (2.00) and 6/4 (2.50), with a stake of £10 on the single accumulator and £2 per line on the full-cover equivalent, produce a band of payouts rather than a single figure. The accumulator returns £75 if all three win, the doubles return between £6 and £10 each depending on which pair wins, and the treble returns £15. The full-cover total return on the all-three-win scenario is £6 + £7.50 + £10 + £15 = £37.50 on a £6 total stake (£2 × 3 doubles and the treble), and the net profit is £31.50. The single accumulator pays £75 on a £10 stake for a £65 net profit. The accumulator pays more on the all-win case; the full-cover pays something on the partial-win cases the accumulator misses entirely. The point is not which is better. The point is that the same three selections produce three different cost-versus-coverage trade-offs, and the Goliath at eight selections is the same trade-off at a much larger scale.

A Goliath on eight selections at 10p per line costs £24.70 to place. The unit stake is small; the total stake is not. The headline eight-fold price on eight legs at average odds of 2.00 each is 2.00⁸ = 256.00, so the all-eight-win payout is £25.60 on the 10p line and the net profit is £0.90. That is a thin margin for a bet that costs £24.70 to place, and it shows why Goliath punters usually back shorter-priced selections: the unit stake stays manageable, the partial-win payouts grow, and the package becomes viable. A Goliath on eight legs at 1.50 each has a headline eight-fold price of 25.63, a 10p-line payout of £2.56 on the all-eight-win scenario and a return on most partial-win combinations that quickly exceeds the total stake. That is the version of the Goliath that makes sense as a bet; the version on long-priced legs is a marketing product, not a punting product.

Regulation: who licenses a Goliath bet in Great Britain

Every bookmaker that takes a Goliath bet from a customer in Great Britain needs a Gambling Commission remote operating licence, and the Commission’s public register is the whole test of who holds one. The Commission’s register can be searched by business name, trading name, domain or account number, and it returns the licence number, the categories the licence covers, the licence holder and the trading names under it. The Gambling Act 2005 covers Great Britain — England, Scotland and Wales; Northern Ireland runs under its own older legislation, and a GB licence is not a Northern Ireland licence. Several brands can run under one licence holder, and several licence holders can run under one parent company. The licence is the test, not the brand.

The Goliath itself is not a separately regulated product. There is no statutory list of permitted bet types in Great Britain. An operator offers the Goliath under its general betting standard licence, with the bet constructed and settled by the operator’s own house rules. The Commission does not prescribe how a Goliath is built, what the price should be or what the unit stake must be. The Commission’s role is to license the operator, enforce the Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice (LCCP) and the Remote Technical Standards (RTS), and adjudicate disputes through approved dispute-resolution bodies. The bet sits inside that frame.

Identity verification is mandatory before a customer can deposit or gamble, including with a free bet or bonus. The minimum age is 18. Credit cards are banned for gambling in Great Britain since April 2020, including credit-card-funded e-wallet deposits; debit cards and bank-based payments are not covered by that ban. There is no state-set deposit ceiling or loss ceiling; deposit limits are a customer-set tool that operators must offer. GAMSTOP is the national multi-operator online self-exclusion scheme, mandatory for online operators, with periods of six months, one year, five years, or five years with auto-renewal, and a seven-year tail after the minimum period.

Safer gambling tools the punter should know about

A Goliath is a high-line-count bet that can move a punter’s account quickly. Three protections sit on every licensed UK bookmaker and are worth setting up before a Goliath is placed.

GAMSTOP is the national self-exclusion register. A punter who registers with GAMSTOP is barred from every GB-licensed online operator for the chosen period, and the registration covers all the operators named above and every other GB-licensed online bookmaker. It is the strongest single tool a punter has and is the right choice when gambling stops being entertainment. The registration is free, the exclusion is enforced by every licensed operator, and the minimum period is six months.

Deposit limits are a customer-set control. Every licensed operator must offer a deposit limit on a fixed time frame; the punter sets the limit and the operator enforces it. The limit is a gross deposit limit, not a net-of-withdrawals limit, and the punter can lower it immediately or raise it after a cooling-off period. A punter placing a Goliath has just decided to stake a multiple of their unit stake, and a deposit limit is the way to make that decision a deliberate one.

Reality checks and time-outs sit alongside the deposit limit. Reality checks are pop-up reminders of how long the punter has been on the site; time-outs are short self-exclusion breaks of 24 hours to several weeks that the punter can take without registering with GAMSTOP. Both are useful for a bet type that asks the punter to keep eight selections live in their head at once.

Help is available outside the operator sites. GamCare runs the National Gambling Helpline; GambleAware funds treatment and research; the NHS runs gambling clinics across England; Gamblers Anonymous runs peer-support meetings. A punter who feels the Goliath has moved from entertainment to compulsion can reach any of these services directly.

Offshore operators and what a GB licence buys

A GB licence is compulsory at the point of consumption. The Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014 closed the loophole that let operators based overseas serve British customers without a Commission licence, and since the change every operator whose remote facilities are used in Great Britain needs a Commission licence wherever the operator itself is based. A Curaçao, Maltese or Gibraltar licence is not a substitute for a GB licence when the customer is in Great Britain. The 10 brands named above all hold GB licences; an offshore operator without a GB licence is taking Goliath bets from British customers illegally.

The protection is real. A GB-licensed operator must verify the customer’s identity before the first deposit, must offer GAMSTOP, must apply the 10x wagering cap on bonuses that took effect in January 2026, must run the financial vulnerability check at the £150 deposit-minus-withdrawal rolling 30-day threshold, must offer a deposit limit on a fixed time frame, must comply with the credit-card ban and must belong to an approved dispute-resolution body. An offshore operator does none of those things by default. The dispute goes to the operator’s home regulator, if any; the GAMSTOP registration does not bar the punter from the offshore site; the funds the punter has deposited sit outside British consumer protection. Honest framing: licensed means checks, limits and a complaints route, but it also means full identity verification before the first bet. Unlicensed means none of those protections and possible loss of funds. Neither is “the safe choice” by default.

Picking selections for a Goliath

A Goliath is a coverage bet, and coverage bets reward accuracy and penalise carelessness more sharply than singles do. Every leg of the eight has to be treated as a single bet that happens to feed 246 other combinations. Three selection habits separate Goliath punters who break even from Goliath punters who do not.

First, the selections should be priced at odds that pay on the partial-win scenarios. A Goliath with eight legs at 1.50 each returns more on the seven-of-eight case than a Goliath with eight legs at 5.00 each returns on the same case, because shorter-priced legs produce larger partial-win payouts relative to the unit stake. The package breaks even earlier. Second, the selections should be independent. A Goliath on eight football matches from the same fixture list, or on eight horses from the same race meeting, carries correlated risk: bad weather, a course condition, a market shock hits all eight legs at once. Singles and doubles from independent events are safer building blocks. Third, the stake should be set against the total cost, not the headline payout. A punter who wants to risk £25 on a Goliath is buying a 10p Goliath, not a £1 Goliath with 24.7 lines of cushion; the headline eight-fold price is paid on 10p, not on £1, and the £24.70 total stake is the budget the punter has to win back.

Pricing a Goliath against the margin

The market-margin is what the bookmaker keeps of every pound staked, and it shows up in the odds on every leg. A punter who shops the eight legs across two or three bookmakers, rather than taking all eight from one operator, gets a tighter package because each leg is priced at a different operator’s margin. The punter can place each leg’s “best price” at the operator that offers it, or place the whole Goliath at the operator whose average margin across the eight legs is tightest. Either approach costs less than taking all eight legs at one operator’s posted price, because every operator is wider than the sharpest price on some legs.

The market-margin is calculated as one minus the payout share. The payout share of a 1X2 football market at home 2.10, draw 3.40, away 3.60 is 1 / (1/2.10 + 1/3.40 + 1/3.60) = 1 / (0.4762 + 0.2941 + 0.2778) = 1 / 1.0481 = 0.9540, so the margin is 1 − 0.9540 = 0.0460 or 4.60%. A tighter market at home 2.10, draw 3.30, away 3.30 returns 0.9605 or a 3.95% margin. The two-outcome equivalent is 1 − (1/odds₁ + 1/odds₂), where the implied probabilities sum to slightly over 100%. Every leg of a Goliath carries its own margin, and the package carries the sum of those margins across 247 lines.

Where the Goliath sits in a punter’s portfolio

A Goliath is a portfolio instrument, in the sense that it is a package of 247 bets the punter strikes at once. Three practical rules follow.

The first is that the Goliath should be sized as a portfolio, not as a single bet. The punter allocates a budget, picks the unit stake that consumes it across 247 lines, and treats the package as 247 wagers at that price. The punter does not bet “an accumulator at Goliath odds”; the punter bets 247 separate wagers whose headline payout happens to be large on the all-eight-win case.

The second is that the Goliath should be sized smaller than the punter’s largest single bet. A punter who normally bets £10 singles should be betting a Goliath at a unit stake whose total is comfortably below £10, because the partial-win scenarios pay less than a £10 single on any single leg. A 4p Goliath costs £9.88 to place and is the largest package the punter should run if the punter’s normal bet size is £10.

The third is that the Goliath should be timed to fixtures the punter has priced. A Goliath struck the morning of the races, with the punter still picking legs, is a bet struck without edge. A Goliath struck the evening before, with the punter having watched team news and price moves, is the same bet with more information behind every leg. The Goliath’s edge is the sum of eight edges, and the punter gives each edge the time it needs.

The mechanics in summary

A Goliath is eight selections priced as 247 separate bets across every combination of two or more. The unit stake is the stake entered on the slip; the total stake is the unit stake multiplied by 247. Each line settles independently at its own multiplied price. A single losing leg kills every line that includes it; every line that does not include it lives on. The package pays nothing if only one selection wins; it pays a small fraction of the headline price if two or three win; it pays most of the headline if seven win; it pays the full headline if all eight win. The bookmaker’s margin sits inside every price, and the package inherits that margin 247 times. The bet is a marketing product dressed up as a punting product, useful for punters with eight strongly-fancied short-priced selections and ruinous for punters chasing the headline payout on long-priced legs they have not priced properly.

The legal frame in Great Britain is the Gambling Commission licence, the LCCP and the RTS, with GAMSTOP, deposit limits and identity verification before the first deposit. Offshore operators without a GB licence are taking Goliath bets from British customers illegally. The 10 brands above all hold GB licences and are the right place to place a Goliath from Great Britain. The punter picks the brand that prices the specific legs the punter wants, and the punter reads the brand’s terms before staking.

Betting tips, forecasting and a note on what tips really are

Goliath betting tips, Goliath betting strategy and Goliath bet tips are search phrases that the gambling market produces in volume, and they share an honest limit. A tip is one punter’s reading of one event, and the tipster has no privileged information about outcomes. A Goliath is eight tips tied together, and the package inherits every tip’s uncertainty eight times. The honest framing is that tips are entertainment with a price tag, and the price tag is whatever the tipster charges, which may be a subscription, an affiliate link or a free bet the tipster has been paid to promote. None of those payments change the underlying uncertainty of the outcome.

Goliath betting strategy is a more useful phrase, because strategy sits at the level of stake sizing, selection independence and margin shopping rather than at the level of picking winners. Three habits are the strategy: independent selections, short-priced legs that produce viable partial-win payouts, and a unit stake that respects the total cost. None of those habits predicts outcomes, and none of them need to. They reduce the cost of being wrong, which is the only thing a punter can actually control.

A Goliath betting system is a phrase to treat with care. No system predicts winners, and any system sold as one is selling certainty the system cannot deliver. Systems that claim to win at Goliath by varying the unit stake, by chasing losses or by selecting “due” outcomes are repackaging the gambler’s fallacy, which is the false belief that past outcomes change the probability of future ones. A Goliath built on the gambler’s fallacy is a Goliath built on a lie.

The closing thought

A Goliath is a bet that pays the punter for being right eight times in a row, and pays the punter a fraction of that for being right seven times. It is a bet that costs 247 times the unit stake and inherits the bookmaker’s margin on every one of those 247 lines. It is a bet that is licensed in Great Britain, regulated by the Gambling Commission and available on every one of the 10 bookmakers named above. It is not a bet for a punter who wants to predict outcomes, because no punter can predict outcomes. It is a bet for a punter who has priced eight selections properly, accepts the package cost and understands that the headline price is paid on the least likely case.

Frequently asked questions

What is a goliath bet?

A Goliath is a full cover bet on eight selections made up of 247 bets. It contains every combination of two or more of those selections: 28 doubles, 56 trebles, 70 four-folds, 56 five-folds, 28 six-folds, 8 seven-folds and the single eight-fold accumulator. There is no singles line. Each combination settles independently at its own multiplied odds, and the unit stake entered on the betting slip is multiplied by 247 to give the total stake.

How many bets in a goliath?

There are 247 bets in a Goliath. The breakdown is 28 doubles, 56 trebles, 70 four-folds, 56 five-folds, 28 six-folds, 8 seven-folds and 1 eight-fold accumulator. The numbers come from the combinations of two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight selections from eight, summed across the seven categories.

How does a goliath bet work?

Each of the 247 lines is settled as its own bet. A winning leg pays out on every combination that includes it; a losing leg kills every combination that includes it. If seven of the eight selections win, the punter is paid on every line that does not include the loser, which is most of the package. If only one selection wins, the package returns nothing because the smallest line is the double. The package pays the headline eight-fold price only when all eight selections win.

How can it be checked that a bookmaker holds a Gambling Commission licence?

The Commission’s public register can be searched by business name, trading name, domain or account number, and it returns the licence number, the categories the licence covers, the licence holder and any trading names under it. A GB-licensed operator must hold a remote general betting standard licence to offer a Goliath, and the register entry confirms the licence is current. There is no separate list of “permitted” bet types, because no such list exists in Great Britain; the licence is the test.

How is the return on a bet worked out from the stake and the odds?

The return on a winning bet is the stake multiplied by the odds. For decimal odds, a £10 stake at odds of 7.50 pays £75, and the net profit is £65. For a combination bet, the odds of the legs multiply into one price, so three legs at 1.50, 2.00 and 2.50 produce a treble price of 7.50 and the same £10 stake returns £75. Each line of a Goliath settles this way on its own multiplied price.

What is the bookmaker’s margin and how can it be seen in the odds?

The bookmaker’s margin is the difference between 100% and the payout share, where the payout share is 1 divided by the sum of the implied probabilities of all outcomes. On a 1X2 football market at home 2.10, draw 3.40, away 3.60, the implied probabilities sum to 1/2.10 + 1/3.40 + 1/3.60 = 0.476 + 0.294 + 0.278 = 1.048, so the payout share is 1 / 1.048 = 95.4% and the margin is 4.6%. The same calculation on a two-outcome market uses 1/odds₁ + 1/odds₂. A tighter margin produces bigger returns on every winning selection; a wider margin produces smaller returns. Every leg of a Goliath carries its own margin.

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