Walk into any tavern, spaza shop counter, or betting outlet on a Friday afternoon in South Africa and you’ll spot the same scene: someone hunched over a coupon, pen in hand, cross-referencing team form against a fixture list taped to the wall. Soccer Pools has been part of the country’s football culture for decades, yet ask ten regular players to explain exactly how a dividend gets calculated, or why one Soccer 6 pool pays R200 a winner while another pays R15,000, and most will shrug. They know how to fill in a coupon. They don’t necessarily know why the system behaves the way it does.

This guide fixes that gap. No theory about reading form, no odds psychology, just the mechanics: how to actually get a ticket in, what happens to your money between kickoff and payout, and which of the three formats fits how you want to play.

 

What You’re Actually Betting Into

Soccer Pools has almost nothing in common with a standard sports bet at a bookmaker. There’s no fixed price quoted for your prediction and no bookmaker taking the other side of your wager. Instead, every rand staked across a pool gets pooled together, and once results are confirmed, that pool gets divided among everyone who landed the winning combination. Fewer winners means a bigger slice each. More winners means a smaller one.

That single fact explains almost every “why does this pay so little” or “why did that pay so much” question players ask. Take two Soccer 13 pools run on the same weekend with similar sized fixture lists: one settles with no player matching all 13 correct picks, so the entire top tier prize, sometimes north of R290,000, rolls straight into the next pool untouched. The other settles cleanly with a handful of winners splitting a payout in the tens of thousands each. Same format, same number of matches, wildly different outcome, because the deciding factor was never the difficulty of the fixtures on paper. It was how many other tickets in circulation happened to guess the same way you did.

 

Soccer 6, Soccer 10, Soccer 13: Picking Your Format

South Africa runs three main coupon formats, and the difference between them isn’t just match count. It’s how forgiving each one is when you get something wrong.

 
Soccer 6 asks you to call six results with no safety net. There are usually several separate Soccer 6 pools running on any given day, each with its own coupon and its own closing time, so a Saturday might offer three or four independent Soccer 6 tickets to choose from. Because it’s all-or-nothing on the top prize, it produces winners more often than the bigger formats, and that simplicity is exactly why it remains where most first-time players start.

Soccer 10 stretches the coupon to ten matches, but the trade-off works in your favour. It pays out at two tiers, 9/10 and the full 10/10. Get nine correct and one wrong, and you’re not walking away empty handed, you’re collecting a smaller but real dividend. This is the format most people underestimate. A single missed prediction on Soccer 6 kills the ticket outright. The exact same miss on Soccer 10 still leaves you in the money at the lower tier.

Soccer 13 and Soccer 13 Xtra spread across thirteen matches, occasionally stretching to 30 across an entire weekend when a jackpot has been rolling. This is genuinely different territory from Soccer 6. With thirteen or thirty legs in play, the number of ways a coupon can go wrong multiplies fast, and casual, gut-feeling picks tend to fall apart across that many matches in a way they don’t across six.

 

Filling In a Coupon, Step by Step

Here’s the actual process, whether you’re standing at a retail counter or on your phone.

• Pick your pool. Look at the fixture list and note the pool code printed on it, something like 6HH, SJJ or Z13. Multiple pools often run in parallel, each with its own code, closing time and set of matches. Grabbing the wrong coupon means your predictions settle against the wrong fixtures entirely.
• Check the closing time. Every pool closes shortly before its earliest match kicks off, not before its last one. A Soccer 6 coupon covering matches from 18:00 to 21:30 will typically close around 18:00, even though four of the six games haven’t started yet. Miss that window and the whole coupon is dead, no matter how good your later picks would have been.
• Mark each match. Use 1 for a home win, X for a draw, 2 for an away win. If you’re not confident on a leg, cover two outcomes with a double chance: 1X (home or draw), X2 (draw or away) or 12 (either team wins, no draw). This raises your stake slightly on that ticket but buys real insurance on a match you’re genuinely unsure about.
• Set your stake and confirm. Minimum stakes are kept deliberately low, this is a volume game, not a high roller one, so most tickets cost only a few rand per line. Confirm the coupon, and if you’re playing retail, keep the printed slip somewhere safe. It’s your only proof of the bet.
• Wait for settlement. Once every match on the coupon has finished, results are confirmed and the pool is settled, usually within hours of the final whistle on the last fixture. The winning combination, the net pool value and the dividend per tier all get published together.

 

The “ALL” Result Nobody Explains Properly

Scroll through enough settled coupons and you’ll eventually hit a match marked ALL instead of 1, X or 2. This isn’t a typo or a glitch. It means the fixture was postponed, abandoned mid-match, or otherwise couldn’t be completed as scheduled, most often weather, a pitch inspection failure, or an administrative issue at a lower-tier ground. When that happens, the operator settles that specific leg as correct for every single ticket in the pool, no matter what anyone actually predicted. It’s a fairness mechanism. Nobody should lose a coupon because a match got called off for reasons that had nothing to do with their prediction skill.

 

Why the Same Pool Can Pay Wildly Different Amounts

This is worth sitting with for a moment, because it’s the part that trips up almost every new player. The net pool for any given tier gets divided by the number of winning tickets at that tier, full stop. A round packed with draws, upsets or genuinely unpredictable results tends to thin out the field of winners dramatically, which pushes the per ticket dividend up. A cleaner round where favourites mostly win produces a wider field of winners and a smaller dividend each.

This is exactly why Soccer 13’s tiered structure matters so much more than it looks on the surface. Missing one or two legs doesn’t necessarily mean missing out entirely. A player who nails 12 out of 13 can still walk away with a serious dividend, sometimes tens of thousands of rand, without ever touching the jackpot tier. Understanding that tier structure changes how you should think about the coupon itself. Spreading a double chance across the two or three fixtures you’re least confident on can be the difference between a wasted ticket and a real payout, even without a perfect card.

If you want the fuller regulatory and structural picture, including how South Africa’s version of this system differs from prediction pools run elsewhere, it’s worth reading through how Soccer Pools work in South Africa before your first serious coupon.

 

The Mistakes That Have Nothing to Do With Football Knowledge

Most losing tickets aren’t lost on the football. They’re lost on the paperwork. The pool code doesn’t match the fixture list. The coupon gets submitted five minutes after the earliest match kicked off. A double chance box gets ticked for the wrong outcome. Someone doesn’t notice a kickoff time shifted and the window closed earlier than expected. None of these have anything to do with knowing the game, and every single one of them is entirely preventable.

A full breakdown of where players consistently lose money to avoidable errors, from coupon handling through to misjudging how the tier system actually pays out, is covered in the most common Soccer Pools mistakes players make. Fixing these costs nothing and improves your odds before you’ve even looked at a single fixture.

 

Which Format Actually Fits You

If you want quick feedback and don’t mind an all-or-nothing structure, Soccer 6 gives you that every week, often multiple times a week. If you’d rather have some cushion when one prediction goes wrong, Soccer 10’s two tier payout is built exactly for that. And if you’re playing for the kind of dividend that changes a month, or a year, Soccer 13 and Soccer 13 Xtra are where the carryovers accumulate into genuinely life changing numbers, at the cost of needing real discipline across thirteen or thirty legs instead of six.

None of these are better or worse than each other in any absolute sense. They reward different kinds of players. The mistake most beginners make isn’t picking the wrong format, it’s picking a format without understanding how its payout structure actually behaves once results start coming in.

The players who win consistently at Soccer Pools aren’t the ones who predict football better than everyone else in the queue. They’re the ones who understand exactly how their coupon settles, before they’ve written a single number on it.

Betting Types Explained

The 1X2 System – Classic Match Result

This is the standard bet used in soccer betting and all Soccer Pools. You choose the outcome after 90 minutes:

• 1 – Home team to win
• X – Draw
• 2 – Away team to win

Singles, Doubles & Triple Bets

Sometimes it’s safer to back more than one possible result in a single match.

Triple Chance Bets are only available in Soccer Pools-style games and lock that leg of your bet.

Double Chance Bets are widely used in normal sports betting and combo tickets.

Double Chance Betting

• 1X – Home win or Draw
• X2 – Draw or Away win
• 12 – Home win or Away win (no draw)

Triple Chance Betting

1X2 – Any result will land (home/draw/away)

Banker Bets & Codes

Bankers are selections with the strongest stats – picks with the highest chance of success.

Over / Under Goals – O/U Explained

Over Goals (O/):

• Over 0.5 – 1+ goal total
• Over 1.5 – 2 or more goals
• Over 2.5 – 3 or more goals
• Over 3.5 – 4 or more goals
• Over 4.5 – 5 or more goals

Under Goals (U/):

• Under 0.5 – goalless match (0-0)
• Under 1.5 – max 1 goal total
• Under 2.5 – max 2 goals
• Under 3.5 – max 3 goals
• Under 4.5 – max 4 goals

Both Teams To Score (BTTS)

• BTTS – Yes: both teams must score
• BTTS – No: one or both teams fail to score