Perm Any 8 From 11 vs 8 From 10: Which Covers Your Misses Better?

Every regular coupon filler eventually asks the same question: is it worth paying more for a bigger perm, or does a smaller one do the job just as well? The honest answer only comes out once you sit down with the combinatorics rather than a gut feeling about “more coverage must be better.” This piece lays the maths of Any 8 From 10 against Any 8 From 11 side by side, so you can see exactly what the extra outlay buys.

What a Perm Actually Does

A perm takes a bank of selections larger than eight and generates every possible combination of eight from within it. The idea is simple: if one or two of your selections turn out wrong, you still want some of those combinations to land on eight correct score draws. The trade-off is cost, because every combination is a separate line and every line carries its own stake.

The number of lines in a perm is given by the combination formula C(n, 8), where n is how many matches you have selected for the bank. In plain terms, C(n, 8) counts how many different ways you can pick 8 matches out of n without caring about order.

• Any 8 From 10: C(10, 8) = 45 lines
• Any 8 From 11: C(11, 8) = 165 lines

So moving from a 10-match bank to an 11-match bank doesn’t just add a handful of extra lines, it multiplies the line count by roughly 3.67 times. That’s the first number worth sitting with before committing a stake.

Cost Comparison at Illustrative Stakes

Because every pools operator sets its own per-line stake and these change over time, the figures below are purely illustrative so you can see the shape of the cost curve rather than treat them as current pricing.

At either stake level, stepping up from a 10-match bank to an 11-match bank roughly triples your total outlay for the week. That’s not a criticism of the bigger perm — it’s simply the arithmetic cost of adding one more match to the pool of selections you’re hedging against.

The Real Question: How Many Wrong Picks Can You Survive?

This is where the two formats actually differ in a meaningful way, rather than just in price. The useful figure is “tolerance” — how many of your selected matches can fail to be score draws while at least one line in your perm still contains eight correct ones.

Tolerance is simply n minus 8, where n is your bank size:

• Any 8 From 10: tolerance = 10 − 8 = 2 wrong picks survivable
• Any 8 From 11: tolerance = 11 − 8 = 3 wrong picks survivable

In other words, paying 3.67 times more for the 11-match perm buys you exactly one extra forgiving miss across the whole bank. Whether that’s good value depends entirely on how confident you are in your weakest one or two selections, and whether you believe your eleventh pick is genuinely strong enough to be in the bank at all, rather than padding it out.

Worked Example: Counting the Winning Lines

Suppose, purely as an illustrative scenario, that out of your 10 selected matches, 9 actually turn out to be score draws and one is wrong. How many of your 45 lines still contain 8 correct results? That’s C(9, 8) = 9 lines out of 45 that would have scored the full 8 from 8, even though one selection let you down.

Now run the same illustrative scenario through the 11-match perm: if 9 of your 11 selections hit and 2 are wrong, the surviving lines are again C(9, 8) = 9 out of 165. Notice something important here — the raw number of winning lines is identical, but it represents a far smaller proportion of a much larger, costlier perm. The extra lines in the 11-match version aren’t adding winning combinations in this scenario; they’re there purely to cover the possibility of a third miss.

Push the illustrative scenario one step further: if all 11 selections hit (a near-perfect week), every one of the 165 lines in the Any 8 From 11 perm would register 8 from 8. In the Any 8 From 10 format with all 10 hitting, all 45 lines would register 8 from 8. Both formats reward a flawless bank proportionally — the difference only shows up when your bank isn’t flawless.

When the Bigger Perm Earns Its Keep

The Any 8 From 11 format makes most sense when you genuinely cannot separate your eleventh selection from the other ten in terms of confidence — when adding it reflects a real uncertainty in your reading of the fixtures rather than simply wanting “one more match for luck.” If you’re consistently confident in ten matches and the eleventh is there because you couldn’t bear to leave it out, you may be paying 3.67 times the stake to insure against a risk you don’t actually believe is there.

Conversely, if your week has two or three fixtures that feel genuinely hard to call — tight league positions, a tactical mismatch, a side returning from a long injury list — building the extra tolerance into an 11-match bank can be the more rational use of the budget, provided the increased stake still fits your overall weekly allowance.

A Simple Framework Before You Commit

1. Rank your selections by confidence, strongest to weakest.
2. Count how many of your bottom-ranked picks you’d genuinely be comfortable losing without the whole perm failing.
3. Match that number to the tolerance figure (2 for 8/10, 3 for 8/11) rather than to the headline line count.
4. Check the resulting stake against your pre-set weekly pools budget before entering anything.

The Bottom Line on Perm Efficiency

Neither format is objectively “better” — they answer different questions. Any 8 From 10 is the leaner option when you trust most of your bank and want modest insurance against one or two slip-ups. Any 8 From 11 triples your stake to buy a single additional unit of tolerance, which only pays off if that extra match genuinely reflects a coin-flip fixture rather than habit. The maths doesn’t tell you which matches will draw — it only tells you, with complete certainty, what you are paying for the cover you’re choosing to buy.

As with any coupon spend, treat the pools as entertainment with a fixed, affordable budget rather than a route to guaranteed income. If you’re 18 or over and choose to play, set a weekly limit before you look at a single fixture, and stop if it stops being fun.