Draw No Bet Guide

Draw no bet (DNB) is a two-way football market with only two outcomes: Team A wins or Team B wins. The draw is effectively cancelled out of the bet. If the match you back ends in a draw, most sportsbooks will void the bet and return your original stake rather than counting it as a loss. This is how DNB works in betting: instead of three possible results (home win, draw, away win) as in a standard 1X2 market, you are only betting on which team wins, with the draw treated as a non-event for settlement purposes. Because one outcome is removed, the odds on each side are shorter than the equivalent 1X2 price, since the bookmaker no longer needs to account for a draw payout. This makes draw no bet a popular choice for bettors who want to avoid losing a stake purely because a match finished level, while accepting slightly reduced returns compared with a straight win market.

Learn more about Online Sports Betting in Nigeria in our dedicated guide.

Example 1: Home win. Suppose you place a draw no bet wager on the home team in a Nigerian Premier Football League fixture at odds of 1.50. The home side wins 2-1. Your bet settles as a straight win, and you receive your stake multiplied by the odds, just as you would with any standard win bet.

Example 2: Match ends in a draw. You back the away team on draw no bet at odds of 2.20, staking ₦2,000. The match finishes 1-1. Because the draw no bet market voids the draw result, your ₦2,000 stake is returned in full. You neither win nor lose money on that selection, which is the core appeal of this market for cautious bettors.

Example 3: Selected team loses. You place a draw no bet on the home team at odds of 1.80, but the away team wins 3-0. Since your selected team did not win and the match did not draw, the bet loses in the normal way, and your stake is forfeited exactly as it would be on any other losing wager.

Example 4: Comparing markets. If the standard 1X2 price for a home win is 1.70 and the draw is priced at 3.60, the draw no bet price on that same home win will typically sit somewhere below 1.70, often closer to 1.45 to 1.55, because the risk of losing to a draw has been removed for the bettor and absorbed into the pricing structure by the bookmaker.

There is a widely used approximate method for working out draw no bet odds from a standard 1X2 market, useful when you want to sanity-check a sportsbook’s quoted DNB price. The general idea is to redistribute the probability of a draw between the two remaining outcomes proportionally.

Step 1: Convert each 1X2 decimal odd into an implied probability by dividing 1 by the odd. For example, if the home win is 1.70, the implied probability is 1 divided by 1.70, which is roughly 0.588, or 58.8%.

Step 2: Do the same for the away win and the draw. If the away win is priced at 4.50 and the draw at 3.60, their implied probabilities are roughly 22.2% and 27.8% respectively.

Step 3: Remove the draw probability from the market and redistribute it proportionally between the home and away win probabilities, based on their relative share of the remaining market.

Step 4: Convert the new adjusted probabilities back into decimal odds by dividing 1 by each adjusted probability. The result gives you an approximate draw no bet price for each side.

Step 5: Remember that bookmakers apply their own margin on top of this calculation, so the DNB odds you see on a live bet slip will rarely match a manual calculation exactly. Treat any manual calculation as a useful estimate rather than an exact prediction, and always check the current odds displayed on the sportsbook before confirming a bet. When comparing offers across platforms, our Best Betting Sites in Nigeria page can help you understand how different operators structure their markets.