Heinz Calculator

A Heinz combines six moneyline picks from the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL into fifty-seven separate bets, with no singles. This calculator turns your American odds and unit stake into the full outlay, return and profit.

What Is a Heinz Bet?

A Heinz is a full cover bet on six selections, built entirely from combinations rather than single bets. It contains fifteen doubles, twenty trebles, fifteen four-folds, six five-folds and one six-fold, for a total of fifty-seven bets. There are no singles, so a single winning pick returns nothing on its own — every line that pays requires at least two of your six selections to win.

The name comes from the Heinz “57 varieties” slogan, a nod to the fact that the bet contains exactly fifty-seven lines. It sits inside a family of full cover bets that scales with the number of selections: five picks make a Canadian, with 26 lines; six make a Heinz, with 57 lines; seven make a Super Heinz, with 120 lines; and eight make a Goliath, with 247 lines. A Heinz is roughly where most casual bettors stop, since the lines — and the outlay they add up to — grow quickly from here.

Because the stake applies to every one of the fifty-seven lines rather than the bet as a whole, the unit stake matters more in a Heinz than in almost any other bet type. A stake that looks small in isolation can produce an outlay many times larger once multiplied fifty-seven times over. Anyone building a Heinz should think in terms of the unit stake, not the total they are willing to risk, since the calculator handles that multiplication for you.

How a Heinz Is Calculated

The math starts with counting the lines: fifteen doubles, plus twenty trebles, plus fifteen four-folds, plus six five-folds, plus one six-fold, adds up to fifty-seven bets. Every one of those lines is staked at the same unit stake, so the total outlay is simply 57 multiplied by that unit stake — there is no separate calculation for each bet type, since the calculator sums them for you.

Working out what each line pays starts with converting each pick’s American odds into a decimal multiplier. For a favorite like Dolphins to beat Patriots at -200, the decimal odds are 1.50; Suns to beat Spurs at -167 converts to 1.60; and Mariners to beat Angels at -125 converts to 1.80. For an underdog like Panthers to beat Senators at +100, the decimal odds are 2.00; Vikings to beat Bears at +120 converts to 2.20; and Cubs to beat Pirates at +150 converts to 2.50. Each line multiplies together the decimal odds of whichever selections make up that line, then multiplies the result by the unit stake to get that line’s return.

The total return for the whole Heinz is the sum of what every line pays out, and the profit is that total return minus the total outlay. Because the fifty-seven lines cover every possible combination of two or more winners from your six picks, the calculator works out every line’s result from however many of your six picks you mark as winners.

What the Calculator Shows You

Once you enter the odds for all six picks and your unit stake, the calculator shows the number of bets that make up the Heinz, broken down by type — doubles, trebles, four-folds, five-folds and the six-fold. It also shows the total outlay, your unit stake multiplied across all of those lines, so you see the real cost of the bet before placing it.

After you mark each pick as a win, loss or push, the calculator shows the total return across every line that still pays, along with the profit once the outlay is subtracted. If some picks lose, it shows how many lines are still live, so you can see how each pick’s result affects the bet as a whole.

Worked Example

Take a Heinz on six moneyline picks at a $0.20 unit stake: Dolphins to beat Patriots at -200, Suns to beat Spurs at -167, Mariners to beat Angels at -125, Panthers to beat Senators at +100, Vikings to beat Bears at +120, and Cubs to beat Pirates at +150. With six selections, the bet breaks into 15 doubles, 20 trebles, 15 four-folds, 6 five-folds and 1 six-fold, for the standard 57 lines. At $0.20 a line, the total outlay is $11.40.

If all six picks win, every one of the 57 lines pays out. The total return comes to $119.78, for a profit of $108.38 once the $11.40 outlay is subtracted. That return comes from combining the decimal odds of 1.50, 1.60, 1.80, 2.00, 2.20 and 2.50 across every double, treble, four-fold, five-fold and the six-fold, each staked at $0.20.

Now suppose the Cubs lose, and the other five picks — Dolphins, Suns, Mariners, Panthers and Vikings — all win. Every line built entirely from those five picks still pays, since a Heinz has no singles and each surviving line only needs its own selections to have won. That leaves ten doubles, ten trebles, five four-folds and one five-fold still live. Those surviving lines return $32.92 in total, for a profit of $21.52 once the $11.40 outlay is subtracted.

This is the core trade-off of a Heinz: missing one of six picks does not wipe out the bet, because 26 of the 57 lines never touched the Cubs selection. The bet is built to survive exactly this kind of partial result, at the cost of a larger outlay to begin with.

What the 57 Bets in a Heinz Actually Are

The fifty-seven lines in a Heinz break into five bet types, each built from a different number of your six selections. Doubles and trebles make up the bulk of the bet — thirty-five lines between them — while the four-folds, five-folds and the single six-fold account for the rest. This breakdown shows why a Heinz survives losses so well: most lines only need two or three winners.

Total Outlay for a Heinz at Different Unit Stakes

Because a Heinz always contains 57 lines regardless of your unit stake, the outlay scales in a straight line as the stake goes up. A $0.10 unit stake keeps the outlay at $5.70, while a $1.00 unit stake takes it to $57.00 for the same six picks. The table below shows how the same 57-line bet costs different amounts depending only on the unit stake chosen.

Why a $1.00 Unit Stake Is a $57.00 Bet

Fifty-seven lines is the point where most bettors start using stakes below a dollar, and where the arithmetic becomes genuinely unintuitive. A $1.00 unit stake on a Heinz is a $57.00 bet, not a $1.00 one — the number in the stake field is not the number that leaves your account. This is the single most common source of confusion around a Heinz, which is why the calculator shows the total outlay separately from the unit stake typed in.

The compensation for that outlay is real resilience. Lose one of your six picks and twenty-six lines still pay, because everything built from the remaining five selections survives untouched. That is a meaningfully different risk profile from a smaller combination bet, where a single loss can wipe out a much larger share of the lines in play.

Anyone sizing a Heinz needs to hold both facts at once: the outlay grows fast because of the 57-line multiplier, but so does the bet’s tolerance for one selection going wrong. Getting the unit stake right means treating it as the per-line amount and checking the total outlay before confirming the bet.

When a Heinz Makes Sense

A Heinz makes the most sense when you have genuine conviction in all six of your picks, not just some of them. Because there are no singles, a pick you are lukewarm on still gets folded into ten different lines that would otherwise have been strong bets on their own. Bringing a weak sixth selection into a Heinz waters down every line that includes it, a cost easy to overlook when focusing only on the payout of a full clean sweep.

The bet suits bettors who want exposure to a slate of picks without needing every one to win, since 26 of the 57 lines survive even when one selection loses. That resilience is the main argument for choosing a Heinz over six single bets or a smaller combination: it spreads risk across every pairing, grouping and larger combination of your six picks, rather than concentrating it all on one outcome.

Where a Heinz makes less sense is when the unit stake has not been sized with the 57-line multiplier in mind, since the outlay can grow far larger than intended. It also makes less sense when only three or four of the six picks are genuinely fancied, since a smaller combination bet built from just those selections would concentrate the stake more efficiently.

Common Mistakes

A common mistake is entering the unit stake as though it were the total outlay, when it is actually multiplied by fifty-seven. Another is expecting a return from a single winning pick, which a Heinz cannot give since it contains no singles. Bettors also sometimes assume six picks means six times the risk of a single bet, when the true complexity is far greater. Finally, choosing a Heinz when only three or four of the six picks are genuinely fancied dilutes every line with selections that were never strong bets to begin with.

Heinz vs Canadian, Super Heinz, and Goliath

A Heinz sits in the middle of the full cover family: bigger than a Canadian’s 26 lines from five selections, but smaller than a Super Heinz’s 120 lines from seven or a Goliath’s 247 lines from eight. Each step up adds a selection and multiplies the lines involved, worth weighing against how many picks you genuinely fancy.