Horse racing permutations are something that can help you to increase your chances of landing a winning double or treble and thereby stand a chance of making a relatively large amount of profit for a relatively small outlay. We have said previously that single bets are superior to horse betting accumulators, but now and again you might want to ignore that advice and go for a double or treble – especially if you have identified a handful of selections that you think have an excellent of winning.

Permutations are groups of selections from a larger group, and the basic idea is that by having a broad range of selections that you think will win, it should be comparatively easy to get a smaller range of selections that actually do win. For example, if you have five horse racing selections that you are confident in, and you labelled these A, B, C, D and E, you could enter 10 doubles as follows:

AB
AC
AD
AE
BC
BD
BE
CD
CE
DE

These ten bets cover every possible combination of selection for a double, so the guarantee here is that if two of your five selections win, you would have one winning double. If more selections were to win, you would have more winning doubles, up to a maximum of 10 doubles for five winning selections.

You could adopt a similar approach for trebles. All you would have to do is enter every possible combination of three horses to guarantee one winning treble if three of your five selections win. Our trebles would therefore be:

ABC
ABD
ABE
ACD
ACE
ADE
BCD
BCE
BDE
CDE

The examples provided so far are for full permutations, which means that every possible combination of horses is included in a bet so that at least one winning double or treble will be obtained if there are two or three winning selections. The problem with full perms is that they are expensive – we need to place ten bets to cover every possible double with five selections and the same for trebles.

The good news is that there is an alternative to full permutations, and that is to enter consecutive selections only. This won’t guarantee a winning double or treble, but it doesn’t require as many bets.

To enter consecutive doubles, label your selections (for example A, B, C, D and E) and then write down every combination of consecutive horses, like this:

AB
BC
CD
DE

For five selections the cost is four bets, and the guarantee here is that if you have at least two consecutive selections that win you will have at least one winning double. The same approach can be taken with trebles, and in that case your bets would be:

ABC
BCD
CDE

Here you would need at least three consecutive selections to win to provide at least one winning treble.

Horse racing permutations won’t appeal to everyone who is involved with horse betting online, but they can be useful to those who like the idea of potentially turning a handful of top-quality selections into one or more winning accumulators.