One of the big highlights of the sporting calendar is the Six Nations. It’s always a special time of the year when the new campaign kicks off. While Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, France and Italy battle it out for supremacy on the field of play, bettors are always keen to forecast just how those contests and indeed the overall competition, will pan out.
Thanks to the high volume of Six Nations rugby betting markets available both pre-match and in-play, punters have many options to choose from. At times, it can be so much that it gets a bit confusing, especially for punters who are newer to the sometimes complex world of sports betting.
To help out, we have put together a comprehensive guide to betting on Six Nations rugby. In it, we guide you through all the common rugby betting markets that can be found for the tournament, as well as lifting the veil on some terms and bet types.
Match Result
This is the most commonly used rugby betting market for the Six Nations and is ideal for beginners dipping their toes in. As the name suggests, the Match Result market is selecting which team will win the fixture, or whether the game will end in a draw.
The draw is always a long-priced option because statistically, unlike football, they don’t happen very often in rugby. The lack of probability of a draw happening increases the divide in odds between match favourites and underdogs.
It’s generally very easy to see who is the favourite in a match because of the short odds. There’s often a very strong favourite for a fixture, meaning that on most occasions there will be a team somewhere less than an odds-on quote (2.0 decimal) as can be seen from the 2025 Six Nations opening round of matches below from TonyBet.
Of the three 2025 Six Nations matches listed above, Ireland vs England was the most evenly-matched, but still, Ireland at 1.3 for the win, represents such a heavy favourite. A €10 punt on Ireland in the above example would return €3.00 out of a total €13 return.
Half-time/full time
The rugby half-time/full-time bet takes a match and breaks it in half, but importantly the two elements remain intertwined. Ireland for example could be backed to win the match at full-time but just adding in the condition of them being ahead at half-time too, for example, will lengthen their odds compared to the Match Result market.
Punters can put together any combination that they think will play out, and something like an England/Ireland HT/FT bet would be long odds, because it forecasts England being ahead at the break, but Ireland is coming back to win the match. The draw option is also included as an option in half-time/full-time bets.
Both the half-time and full-time prediction have to be exact for the bet to win. An Ireland/Ireland HF/FT wager would lose if the teams were drawing at the break, even if Ireland won the match.
Tournament Winner
The tournament winner betting options look at the bigger picture of which team will win a competition. That could be a prediction on Ireland winning the Six Nations, Munster lifting the European Champions Cup or South Africa to win the Rugby World Cup. An example is a pre tournament Six Nations bet on Ireland to win the championship at 3.00 odds, which would return €30 from a €10 stake.
Tournament winner selections are usually picked before the competition even starts, and markets are posted well in advance. But even when the tournament, say the Rugby World Cup is still in the pool stage or just two rounds of the 6 Nations have been completed, a punt on the outright winner can still be taken.
A big appeal of tournament bets is bigger prices, and that, coupled with the potential pool of actual winners being fairly small, makes long-term outrights very popular.
Grand Slam
Staying focused on the Six Nations tournament, there are alternative outright markets worth exploring beyond the outright winner, like the Grand Slam winner. This market calls for a prediction on whether a team will win the Slam, i.e. winning all five matches, and an example would be France 5.5 odds if Les Bleus were in strong shape.
A Grand Slam doesn’t happen every season, of course, and between 2020 and 2024 inclusively, only two of the five seasons produced one. Therefore, the shortest-priced option is always the ‘No Winner’, which is backing that no team will secure the Slam.
Triple Crown
Another variant of a long-term forecast market for Six Nations betting is the Triple Crown. This only applies to Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales and it’s achieved by one team beating those other three opponents (results against France and Italy don’t factor in).
Again, like a Grand Slam, it’s not something that happens every season, so the ‘No Winner’ option is usually in play at around 2.88 odds, right alongside the price of a firm favourite like Ireland at 2.6 odds.
That means that from a €10 wager, either €28.80 or €26.00 would be returned if the bet was realised. Triple Crowns are a little more common than Grand Slams and one was won every year from 2018 to 2023 inclusive.
To Finish Bottom
Another alternative market that can be found is the To Finish Bottom option for the final standings of the Six Nations. The perceived weakest team is at the head of the market, and it’s basically the reverse of the Tournament Winner market. So here you may see Wales at 1.91 or Italy at 2.25 for narrow-priced bets, where a €10 punt on Wales would bring in €9.10 profit from a total €19.10 return.
Total Points
The total points in a match can also be the focus of betting. Regardless of the actual result, the tally of points is what matters. So if an Ireland vs Wales match ended in a 27-13 result, that would be a total of 40 points for the match.
A bet that had been placed for Over 39.5 points for example would have won, but a bet on Under 39.5 would have resulted in a loss. A great thing about this over/under market is that the line can be teased.
Look at the options around even money to start with, and then assess longer odds in either direction. It could be a swing towards a low under points tally if a tight war of attrition was expected, or going well above the even-money line for something like Over 55.5 points if a high scoring game looked on the cards.
First, last or anytime Try scorer
Getting into the realm of tougher predictions are try scorer options for Six Nations betting. There are three pre-match options for this:
- First Try scorer – The first person to score the opening try of a fixture, not necessarily the first points of the game.
- Anytime Try scorer – This is backing a player to score a touchdown at any stage of the match.
- Last Try scorer – The player that’s the last to score a try in a fixture. If a game only has one try, that player would cover first, anytime and last try scorer bets!
These are notoriously tricky markets to call, however because of there being so many variables. There are 22 players on the pitch at the start of a match, and selecting which one of those is going to score a try first is a tough call.
It’s harder as well because the first try scorer could be someone that’s come off the bench, while a Last Try scorer selection isn’t guaranteed to still be on the pitch midway through the second half because of injuries, substitutions and even cards.
That’s why these are markets often avoided by a lot of season punters, and the volatility of the market is reflected by the odds. A favourite in the First Try scorer market, for example, could be a flying winger, and still be around 8.0 or longer.
Of all three try scorer markets the one that provides the most coverage is the Anytime Try scorer. The odds are narrower compared to the First and Last, but it strips away the specific conditions for much more flexibility.
Handicap bets
Handicap betting for the Six Nations is the great alternative to the match outright. As mentioned above, in a lot of cases there is strong match variety, which in turn leaves little value in the market. Backing Ireland for example at 1.3 odds for a €3 profit is a reasonable wager.
But adding in a conditional handicap could extract more value from the same expected outcome of an Ireland win. An example is an Ireland -7.5 handicap for a quote of 1.82. A €10 stake on that would return €8.20 profit, due to the extra requirement of Ireland having to win by at least 8 clear points.
Handicap bet lines can be set anywhere, and the bigger the points difference from zero, the greater the odds. An Ireland -19.5 handicap for 5.0 odds for example, is a much more difficult and unlikely bet to get right.
Handicaps can be positive or negative. A positive handicap would be backing an underdog like England not to lose by more than a certain amount of points. An England +9.5 handicap at 1.67 odds therefore would win €6.70 only if they didn’t lose by more than nine points.
There is a tremendous amount of flexibility in rugby handicap betting, which is why it is so popular. For the most part, unless a match looks really lopsided, such as New Zealand vs Canada at the World Cup, then you will commonly find the even money price around -7.5 to -9.5 for a favourite. Then it’s down to the skill of the bettor to tease that line.
Accumulator (acca)
Accumulators divide a lot of rugby punters. Some never touch them because of the risk involved, while others will see them as a challenging side bet to regular, more straightforward options.
An accumulator, commonly known as just an acca, is a bet that combines different bets into one. For the Six Nations, that could be all three matches in a given round of action. Going back to the example of matches from TonyBet above, a punter could collate options for the winner of each fixture.
Perhaps it would be France, Scotland and Ireland for a sweep of home wins, and then those three selections are merged into one bet with cumulative odds (1.01 x 1.03 x 1.3) which would bring the bet’s odds to around a 3.52 quote. A €10 acca stake would then return €3.52 profit on three solid home favourites.
An acca can typically have up to twelve selections in it. People play them in different ways, like picking a firm favourite, then having other longer priced options included to try and shoot for bigger value from a relatively small stake.
As an example, switching an acca to France, Italy and Ireland instead would be 1.01 x 12.0 x 1.3 for 47.5 acca odds, which would return a profit of €147.56 from that same €10 stake, but simply because it’s far more risky.
The balance with acca is that it only takes one leg to go wrong and the entire bet falls apart. Even if it was an acca made up of five odds-on favourites, there’s still a sizable risk there, as the more legs that are included in the bet, the greater the risk is.
Double Chance
In a Double Chance bet, two of the three potential match results are combined into one bet, such as Ireland or Draw for 1.23 odds. That means that if the result is anything but an England victory, the bet would win.
Combining a draw option with a team really chops value from just backing the team to win in the match outright, because of the extra coverage. The other option would be Ireland or England, which is always the shortest-priced option in a Double Chance market and usually around a very low 1.03 mark.
Winning Margin
An alternative to handicap betting is winning margins. This gets a little more specific, because it also involves a prediction on which team is going to win, coupled with how many points they will win by.
Options in the Winning Margin rugby betting market are given in points ranges, which are 1-7, 8-14 and then 15+. So an Ireland 1-7 margin of victory for example at 3.9 odds would require them to not win by more than seven points for a profit of €3.90 from a €10 stake. If they won 17-10 all would be good, but if that margin was 17-9, then the bet would lose.
Half Betting
A focus on Six Nations rugby betting doesn’t have to be on the entire match. It could be based on just the first 40 minutes of action, and there are a lot of 1st Half markets available which are settled by the half-time score, and the most common is which team will be winning at the break.
There is, for example, a First Half Winning Margin market available, which takes the same principle and points ranges from the full match Winning Margin market, but condenses it to the half-time result. A 1st Half Handicap option can be selected, a 1st Half Double Chance and 1st Half Draw No Bet are further options for 1st Half betting.
Race to 10 Points
An alternative market is the Race to 10 points. This is the forecast of which team will be the first to reach the threshold of 10 points scored in the match. It doesn’t matter how the points are scored, or what the final result of the match is. That threshold can be also crossed at any point of the match as well, even deep into the second half and still be valid.
The team heading into a match as favourite will naturally be a firm favourite, probably around 1.5 odds which returns €1.50 from a €10 stake. The underdog could be out around 2.5 odds, which returns €2.50 from a €10 wager.
In play bets
All of this can be taken into the dynamic realm of live in play betting as well. Many of the same markets like the Match Result and Handicaps can be studied while the game is in full swing. Other options like the Next Team To Score and Next Try scorer will also pop up.
With live in-play betting, you can track the latest odds, which can change in the blink of an eye. Every moment that passes in the game will affect the odds, as will major events like a try being scored.
Many punters try to balance their in-play betting and pre-match options. An example would be a pre-match wager on Ireland to win, but if England were to pull 10 points clear in the first 20 minutes for example, an in-play bet on England to win, at the right market price, could offset the potential losses of that initial Ireland bet.
An alternative in-play rugby betting strategy would be backing Ireland to win in the live match outright if they were carrying a six-point deficit into the final five minutes of the game. At that point, they would be a much longer price to win than they were in the pre-match quote.
Responsible Gambling
The above just touches on the many possibilities for Six Nations betting. Don’t be spoiled by choice and try to cover everything; instead, learn one or two markets that appeal and get to know them inside out for things like relevant stats and where the market value is.
Always manage the bankroll wisely and don’t get swept up in the thrills of the Six Nations by betting carelessly on it. TonyBet fully supports Responsible Gambling and they have a fantastic range of rugby markets and extensive in-play coverage for all the Six Nations matches.
