Lucky 15 dead heats

A dead heat is simply a tie, where the judge cannot split two or more horses at the finish and they share the win. The rules bookies work to treat half your stake on that horse as lost, while the half that survives gets paid at the price you took, as the Tattersalls Committee lays out in Rule 10.

Put £1 on a 4/1 shot and a two-way dead heat pays you £2.50, since only 50p stands as a winning stake. Had the horse won outright you would have collected £5.00, so the tie halves your return on that one horse.

Sky Bet explains the identical rule in different words: your stake is split by how many horses tied and then multiplied by the odds. Both wordings land on the same figure, so the phrasing your bookie picks does not matter.

Yes. Your Lucky 15 is 15 separate bets on four horses: four singles, six doubles, four trebles and one fourfold. That horse also appears in many of the doubles, trebles and the fourfold, so the cut shows up again and again across your slip.

Rule 10a covers what happens inside a double: the halved stake, settled at full odds, turns into the stake that rolls on to the other selection. In everyday language, less money rolls onto the next leg, so that leg pays out less as well. Trebles and fourfolds behave identically, with each leg passing its return to the next.

Picture a £1 win Lucky 15 on horses at 2/1, 3/1, 4/1 and 5/1, costing £15 for the 15 bets. Imagine the 2/1 shot and the 3/1 shot both win and the other pair lose. The 2/1 single pays £3.00, the 3/1 single pays £4.00 and the double between them pays £12.00, giving you £19.00 back and a £4.00 profit.

Now imagine the 3/1 horse dead heated two ways rather than winning alone. In both the single and the double, half the stake on it gets paid at full odds, and the slip now hands back £11.00 rather than £19.00. One horse tying took your return from £19.00 down to £11.00.

Had the 4/1 horse won as well, three horses would be paying in and the slip would return £71.00. The dead heat still cuts the return, but the extra winner adds to it.

If three horses tie, the rule already covers it. Under Tattersalls Rule 10, a triple dead heat or worse means the stake is scaled down in proportion, so a three-way tie pays full odds on a third of your stake and a four-way tie on a quarter.

That reduced portion then moves through the doubles, trebles and fourfold in precisely the same fashion as a half share.

A Rule 4 trims the odds when a horse comes out of the race close to the off, deducted as pence in the pound from what you won. If a dead heat and a Rule 4 land together, Rule 10b says the Rule 4 comes off the winnings on the already reduced stake, meaning both cuts apply together rather than one wiping out the other.

By itself, a 25p Rule 4 for a 4/1 winner takes a £1 single's winnings down from £4.00 to £3.00, returning £4.00 rather than £5.00. Throw in a dead heat and the figure that cut starts from is already halved.

Going each way doubles the slip to 30 bets, so £1 each way comes to £30: 15 bets backing the horses to win and 15 backing them to place. Bookies settle each way multiples as two separate parts, win and place, treating the win part and the place part as two distinct slips that get totalled at the end.

A dead heat for first place cuts the win side exactly as it would on a win-only slip. Each-way multiples are settled win to win and place to place, with each horse keeping its own race's place terms.

Nothing about a dead heat touches what you staked. A £1 win Lucky 15 set you back £15 at the counter and stays at £15 afterwards; only the return moves. A dead heat changes your return, not the original cost: a 50p win Lucky 15 still costs £7.50, and a £2 win Lucky 15 costs £30.