Union Jack bets

The Union Jack bet is a specialty bet that involves a total of eight treble bets placed on nine selections, which are lined up in a 3×3 grid on a specially designed betting slip.

For example, say you have nine selections picked for a series of nine horse races – H1 through to H9. They’d be arranged as follows in a 3×3 grid:

In this example, your eight trebles include three vertical combinations, three horizontal combinations and two diagonal combinations, as follows:

• H1, H2 and H3 (first horizontal row)
• H4, H5 and H6 (second horizontal row)
• H7, H8 and H9 (third horizontal row)
• H1, H4 and H7 (leftmost vertical row)
• H2, H5 and H8 (middle vertical row)
• H3, H6 and H9 (rightmost vertical row)
• H1, H5 and H6 (diagonally from top left to bottom right)
• H7, H8 and H9 (diagonally from bottom left to top right).

For any treble to give a return, all three of the selections it includes must win.

How a Union Jack bet works in practice

When you place a £1 Union Jack bet, you’ll actually be staking £8. That’s because the bet involves a total of eight trebles.

Something important to note about how a Union Jack bet works is that some of the selections in the 3×3 grid appear in more trebles than others, as follows:

• the selection in the centre of the grid (H4 above) appears most often, in a total of four trebles
• selections in the corner positions (H1, H3, H7 and H9 above) each appear in a total of three trebles
• the remaining selections (H2, H5, H6 and H8) each appear in only two trebles.

In other words, the placement of the selections isn’t random and requires careful thought. Once you get the hang of how Union Jack bets work, you’ll be able to position your selections based on factors like their odds and what you know about their recent form.