POOLS PLANS

Pools plans are football pools entry strategies that are designed to allow you to pick a greater number of selections whilst at the same time keeping costs down. As explained in our section on Full Perms, covering every possible combination of selections in order to guarantee the best eight results appear in one line is a costly business. Pools plans keeps those costs down by offering only limited guarantees about how matches will line up.

For example, if you play the Classic Pools and use Lit Plan 152 (so-called because the plan was invented by the Littlewoods Pools company) you are allowed to make 12 selections. The cost of the Lit Plan 152 entry is £2.20. The cost for a full perm of 8 from 12 would be £7.50. The pools plan therefore saves you £5.30 but you don't get full coverage. Instead, the guarantee is that, if any 9 of your 12 matches result in score draws, you will have at least one winning line of 8 score draws. And should any 7 of the 12 be score draws, you would have all 7 in at least one line.

Lit Plan B38 is another pools plan that you can use with the Classic Pools. This allows you to select 15 matches and costs £12.16 (instead of £85 for a full perm). The guarantee here is that if any 9 of the 15 matches produce score draws, then you are certain to have at least one line worth 24 points. If any 8 of the 15 matches results as score draws you will have seven and maybe all eight of them in at least one line.

Various newspapers have developed their own pools plans over the years, and you can use many of these when playing the Classic Pools game. The good thing about using pools plans today is that all you have to do is point and click on the football pools website. In the old days you would have had to write out your pools plan entry manually, and that could have required several coupons and writing complicated instructions on each one.

Whilst some football pools players don't like pools plans because of the much looser coverage that they offer when compared with full perms, the reduced cost of pools plans and the ability to select more matches as a result makes them very advantageous in their own way. Picking 8 score draws from 10 selections for a full perm is very tricky, but picking 9 from 15 with a pools plan is - at least in theory - a heck of a lot easier.