Calculating Banker Perms With Floating Matches: A Guide

Most experienced pools players eventually move past straight single-line coupons and start experimenting with perms — ways of combining several fancied matches into multiple qualifying lines. One of the most useful variations is the banker perm, where a handful of fixtures you trust completely sit outside the maths entirely, while a wider group of “floating” matches does the combinatorial work. Here is how to build one from scratch.

Step 1: Understand the two roles on your coupon

A banker-plus-floating perm splits your selections into two categories:

• Bankers — matches you are backing with high confidence. These are included in every single line of your perm without exception. You are effectively saying “this result must be correct for any line to pay out.”
• Floating selections — a wider pool of matches where you are less certain, but want coverage across several possible outcomes. The perm structure decides how many of these floating matches need to come right in each individual line.

The appeal is obvious: bankers let you lock in your strongest views without diluting them, while the floating group gives you breathing room on fixtures that feel more open.

Step 2: Choose your floating perm size

Floating perms are described as “k from n” — for example, a 6-from-10 perm means you have shortlisted 10 floating matches, and each line in your perm uses a different combination of 6 of them. The number of lines this generates is given by the combination formula:

C(n, k) = n! / (k! × (n − k)!)

You do not need to calculate this by hand each week — most coupon guides and staking calculators publish reference tables — but understanding where the number comes from helps you judge whether a perm size is actually affordable before you commit to it.

Worked example: 6 from 10

Take 3 banker matches plus 10 floating matches, using a “6 from 10” perm (meaning 6 of the 10 floating picks need to be correct in any given line, alongside all 3 bankers). The number of lines is C(10,6) = 210 lines. This is an illustrative example only, not a recommendation for any specific week’s fixtures.

Worked example: a smaller, cheaper alternative

If that feels too large, trimming the floating pool to 9 matches on the same “6 from” structure gives C(9,6) = 84 lines — a little over a third of the size. Trimming further to 8 floating matches on a 6-from-8 basis brings it down to C(8,6) = 28 lines. The table below sets out the illustrative pattern.

Per-line prices vary by operator and promotion, so treat the 15p figure purely as an illustrative constant for comparing structures against each other, not as a current real-world price.

Step 3: Work the cost backwards from your budget

Rather than picking a perm size first and discovering the cost afterwards, it is usually more disciplined to start with your weekly stake limit and work backwards. If your budget for a coupon is around £15, the 6-from-9 structure at an illustrative £12.60 fits comfortably with a small buffer, whereas the 210-line 6-from-10 perm does not. This single step — checking affordability before committing to a structure — is the step most new players skip, and it is the one that causes budget overruns most often.

Step 4: Decide how many bankers is sensible

There is a temptation to bank five or six matches “because they all look safe.” Resist it. Every banker you add is a single point of failure for the entire perm — if just one banker goes wrong, every single line in your perm misses regardless of how the floating matches behave. Most seasoned players cap bankers at two or three fixtures where they have a genuinely strong, well-reasoned view, and let the floating section carry the bulk of the uncertainty.

A note on perm abbreviations and formats

Different operators and different coupon guides sometimes use slightly different shorthand for the same underlying structure, so it is worth reading the specific format notes on whichever coupon you are using rather than assuming every “6 from 10” label means exactly the same thing everywhere. Some formats specify the number of floating matches that must be correct out of the total floating selections; others frame it around how many of your picks can be wrong and still qualify. Both describe the same combinatorial structure, just from opposite ends, and mixing them up is an easy way to misjudge your actual line count and cost before you have even submitted anything.

It is also worth checking whether your chosen coupon format allows bankers to be combined with floating perms at all — not every operator or every coupon type supports this hybrid structure in the same way, and some apply different minimum or maximum limits on how many bankers or floating selections you can include. A quick check of the specific rules for your coupon before building a perm saves the frustration of designing a structure that turns out not to be available.

Common pitfalls worth avoiding

• Treating a banker as “safe” because it is a big club at home. Reputation is not the same as a well-reasoned case for a specific result. Bankers deserve the same scrutiny as any other pick, just with a higher confidence threshold attached.
• Forgetting that floating perms do not require every floater to be correct. New players sometimes stake a large floating perm and then feel disappointed when not every single match comes in, forgetting that this is precisely the point of the structure — only the specified number needs to land.
• Underestimating how quickly line counts grow. Moving from a 6-from-9 to a 7-from-11 perm looks like a small adjustment on paper but roughly quadruples the line count, and therefore the cost, in the worked examples above.

Step 5: Review before submission

Before finalising a banker perm, run through a short checklist:

1. Are your bankers genuinely your strongest views, not just the first matches you looked at?
2. Does the floating perm size fit your actual weekly budget, with room to spare?
3. Have you avoided overlapping bankers and floaters that are essentially correlated (two teams from the same relegation six-pointer, for instance)?
4. Does the total line count match what you intended, double-checked against the combination table?

Getting comfortable with this structure takes a couple of attempts, but the underlying maths never changes — it is simply a matter of matching your confidence levels to the right role on the coupon, and matching your perm size to what you can actually afford to stake.

Pools play should always stay within sensible limits. Set a fixed weekly budget before you build any perm, treat the hobby as entertainment rather than a source of income, and if you are 18 or over and choose to play, stop if it stops being fun.