Heinz Flag Calculator

This calculator works out the return on a Heinz Flag, an eighty-seven-bet wager built from six moneyline picks in sports like MLB, NFL, or NBA, once you enter each price and your unit stake in dollars.

What Is a Heinz Flag?

A Heinz Flag is a Heinz with fifteen up-and-down pairs added on top. The Heinz portion covers every double, treble, four-fold, five-fold and six-fold across six selections — fifteen doubles, twenty trebles, fifteen four-folds, six five-folds and one six-fold, for fifty-seven bets. The Flag adds fifteen up-and-down pairs, one for every pairing of two selections, and each pair counts as two bets, adding thirty lines. Fifty-seven plus thirty gives eighty-seven bets on six picks.

The idea behind a Heinz Flag is the idea behind any full-cover bet: a return is possible even when not every selection wins, since multiples that miss a leg can still be covered by combinations that do not need it. The up-and-down pairs extend that further. Rather than needing both legs to win outright, a pair returns money in sequence — the first leg’s winnings are staked on the second — giving the bet a way to pay out that the ordinary Heinz multiples do not.

What sets a Heinz Flag apart from other bets its size is not the selections, which are the same six moneyline picks a plain Heinz would use, but the stake. At eighty-seven bets, a stake that feels reasonable on a single bet becomes a large outlay once multiplied eighty-seven times over, so the stake is the first decision to get right, not the last.

How a Heinz Flag Is Calculated

The eighty-seven bets come from two counts added together. The Heinz is a full set of doubles, trebles, four-folds, five-folds and a six-fold across six selections: fifteen doubles, twenty trebles, fifteen four-folds, six five-folds and one six-fold, summing to fifty-seven bets. Each multiple is priced by multiplying the decimal odds of every leg it contains — a double on the Blue Jays at 1.50 and the Rays at 1.70 returns 1.50 x 1.70 per dollar staked, and the same multiplication carries through the larger multiples.

The Flag then adds fifteen up-and-down pairs, one for every combination of two selections from the six. An up-and-down pair is two bets, not one: the stake is split so the first selection’s return is staked on the second, and the second selection’s return is staked on the first. That is why fifteen pairs contribute thirty bets rather than fifteen. Fifty-seven from the Heinz plus thirty from the pairs gives the eighty-seven bets the calculator prices.

Total outlay follows directly: eighty-seven multiplied by whatever stake you enter. There is no separate stake per bet type — the same stake applies to all eighty-seven lines, which is why the total climbs quickly even at stakes that look modest alone. The calculator sums the returns bet by bet and adds the Heinz and the pairs together for the total.

What the Calculator Shows You

Once you enter the odds for all six picks, mark each as a win, loss or push, and set your unit stake, the calculator breaks the result down instead of handing you a single number. It shows the total number of bets — eighty-seven — split into the fifty-seven Heinz lines and the thirty pair bets. It shows your total outlay, the stake multiplied across every bet. It shows the return from the Heinz and from the pairs separately, since the pairs settle in sequence rather than as straightforward multiples. Finally, it shows the combined return across all eighty-seven bets and the profit once outlay is subtracted.

Worked Example

Take a Heinz Flag on six moneyline picks at a $0.20 stake: Blue Jays to win at -200 (1.50), Rays to win at -143 (1.70), Twins to win at -125 (1.80), Royals to win at +100 (2.00), Angels to win at +120 (2.20), and Tigers to win at +160 (2.60).

Six selections produce a Heinz of fifty-seven bets — fifteen doubles, twenty trebles, fifteen four-folds, six five-folds and one six-fold — plus fifteen up-and-down pairs worth thirty more bets, for eighty-seven bets in total. At $0.20 a bet, the total outlay is eighty-seven times $0.20, which comes to $17.40.

If all six picks win, the Heinz Flag returns $145.68. Subtract the $17.40 outlay and the profit is $128.28. That return is built from the fifty-seven Heinz multiples — each priced by multiplying the decimal odds of the legs it contains — plus the fifteen up-and-down pairs, which settle in sequence rather than as straight multiples and can contribute even when not every leg lines up the way a standard multiple needs.

The gap between the $17.40 outlay and the $145.68 return shows what the extra thirty bets are for: picking up returns the fifty-seven-bet Heinz alone would miss. At $0.20 a bet, eighty-seven bets are a manageable commitment; the same bets at a larger stake would be a very different amount of money, which is why the stake in a Heinz Flag deserves as much attention as the picks.

What the 87 Bets in a Heinz Flag Are Made Of

A Heinz Flag’s eighty-seven bets break down into the five multiple types that make up the Heinz, plus the up-and-down pairs. The table below lists how many lines each component contributes, from the fifteen doubles at the smallest end to the single six-fold that needs every selection to win. The pairs are grouped as thirty lines, since each of the fifteen pairs is priced as two bets rather than one.

Total Outlay for a Heinz Flag at Different Unit Stakes

The number of bets never changes — it is always eighty-seven, regardless of the stake you choose. What changes is the total outlay, since every one of those eighty-seven bets carries the same stake. The table below shows the total outlay at four common unit stakes, from a dime a bet up to a dollar a bet. Moving from $0.10 to $1.00 does not change how the bet is built; it only changes how much of your bankroll it commits.

Getting the Stake and the Pairs Right

Eighty-seven bets is a large number to multiply a stake by, and it catches people out in a specific way: a $1.00 unit stake is not a dollar bet, it is an $87.00 commitment, because every one of the eighty-seven lines carries that same stake. That is why most Heinz Flags are struck in tens of cents rather than whole dollars — at $0.20 a bet, the same eighty-seven lines come to $17.40, a very different amount for the same structure. If the outlay looks larger than expected the moment you enter a stake, that is the bet doing exactly what eighty-seven bets does to any per-bet price.

The fifteen up-and-down pairs deserve separate attention, because they contribute thirty of the eighty-seven bets and behave differently from the rest. Unlike the Heinz multiples, which either land or do not based on every leg winning, the pairs settle in sequence — the return from one leg is staked onto the other — meaning they can produce a return where the ordinary multiples come up short. That also makes them harder to check by eye: you cannot glance at a result and see what the pairs contributed the way you can with a double or a treble. The safest approach is to let the calculator show the Heinz return and the pairs return separately, rather than estimating either from the picks alone. Treating the pairs as ordinary lines, or being surprised by the outlay afterward, are signs the stake and pair structure were not thought through beforehand.

When a Heinz Flag Makes Sense

A Heinz Flag suits a bettor who genuinely wants six selections in play and is comfortable with a bet that pays out across many partial results rather than needing everything to land. The up-and-down pairs are the reason to choose a Flag over a plain Heinz: they return money when two selections come in but the wider multiples around them do not quite complete, which a fifty-seven-bet Heinz alone cannot do. If that extra coverage matters to how you think about the six picks, the Flag earns its place over the Heinz.

That coverage is not free. Thirty extra bets on top of the Heinz’s fifty-seven means the total outlay is roughly half again what the same six picks would cost as a plain Heinz, at the same stake. Because eighty-seven bets multiply a stake so aggressively, the sensible way to manage a Heinz Flag is to treat the stake, not the selections, as the main lever: a smaller unit stake keeps the outlay proportionate. Six selections should be chosen because you have six picks worth backing, not stretched to in order to justify the bet type.

If the appeal is really a large number of selections rather than the up-and-down structure, a plain Heinz at a larger stake covers the same six picks for less outlay.

Common Mistakes

The most common mistake is entering a unit stake as if it were the total outlay, when it is actually multiplied by eighty-seven to get the full commitment. A related one is treating the thirty bets that make up the fifteen up-and-down pairs as ordinary lines, when they settle conditionally, in sequence, rather than all at once. Some bettors choose a Heinz Flag when a plain Heinz at a larger unit stake would suit their picks better and cost less. And a few stretch to six selections just to justify the bet type, rather than starting from six picks they genuinely back.

Heinz Flag vs Its Base Bet and Neighbors

A Heinz Flag adds thirty up-and-down bets to the same six selections a Heinz already covers, taking the total from fifty-seven bets to eighty-seven. A Lucky 63 sits between the two, at sixty-three bets, since it adds six singles to the same fifty-seven multiples rather than fifteen pairs. All three cover the same six selections; they differ only in how many bets they use.