Big Price Bets That Came Off | Most Famous Long Odds Wagers
When it comes to the world of betting, there’s nothing that sounds more fun and enjoyable than a wager with long odds that comes home. We often see the world of betting as being an adversarial one, where we take on the bookmakers and joust with them when we place our smaller bets and then go for knockout punches when we fancy something a little bit longer. There’s also something of a team mentality between bettors, enjoying success stories of others who have been able to get one over on the bookies.
How often does it happen, though? Well, it probably tells you something that whenever particular big bets come home we hear about it! The press also love to print stories about flutters that have landed, enjoying them as much as they do reporting on boxing matches or political ding-dongs. More often than not it’s footballing fairytales that we tend to hear about when it comes to long-shot bets coming home, but the world’s most popular sport doesn’t have a monopoly on them. Here’s a look at some of the best betting success stories from over the years.
Leicester City Win The League
Having said that football doesn’t have a monopoly on bets with long odds, there’s really no other place to start on this page than with the remarkable story of Leicester City winning the Premier League at the end of the 2015-2016 season. It’s entirely fair to say that no sensible bets were being placed on the Foxes at the start of the campaign, given they’d spent most of the previous year in the relegation zone. When the club’s owners decided to release Nigel Pearson in summer of 2015 and bring in Claudio Ranieri, even level-headed supporters such as Gary Lineker wondered what they were playing at.
Given that Ranieri’s previous job had seen him sacked rather quickly as the national manager of Greece, the confusion was understandable. That the likes of Manchester City, Manchester United and Chelsea had spent huge amounts of money meant that they were seen as the most likely teams to life the trophy, so bookmakers thought nothing of the 5000/1 odds that they gave to the Midlands club. The biggest thing that hurt the bookmakers wasn’t the ridiculously long odds, though there were a number of people who took advantage of the bet, but rather the fact that they didn’t adjust their thinking even when Jamie Vardy was scoring for fun and Leicester won ten games in a row. Even in December you’d have been able to get odds of 150/1.
This was the biggest single-odds win of any sport in bookmaking history, so it’s only right that we put it front and centre for this piece.
Dettori Takes Ascot By Storm
The reason we’ve made reference to the Leicester City win being the biggest ‘single-odds’ win is that accumulators are always more likely to pay you big time if they come off; the thing is, of course, they don’t often come off. If accas in general don’t always come in then that’s as nothing when compared to an accumulator on one jockey winning all of the races in a single day. Yet that’s exactly what Frankie Dettori did on the Saturday of Royal Ascot back in 1996.
Willie Carson won six races at Newcastle in 1990, which is the closest any jockey had ever come to winning all seven races in the same day. It was a feat that was thought to be close to impossible, so it’s hardly surprising that the accumulator odds on it happening amounted to more than 25,000/1. It was such a remarkable achievement that the BBC even interrupted Grandstand to show the final race of the Italian’s remarkable achievement.
50p Goes A Long Way
Speaking of accumulators that have outrageous odds, the 25,000/1 shot on Frankie Dettori was as nothing compared to the bet placed by a sixty-year-old named Fred Craggs back in 2008. There’s no way to know for sure just how much thought he put into his selections, but given it was his birthday and some of the horses were named things like “Dream Come True” and “Isn’t That Lucky”, it’s likely that he wasn’t thinking too long and hard about the choices he was making.
He was betting on an eight horse accumulator and he’d picked eight options with long odds on each. As a result, the rolling amount offered by the bookies on his selections racked up to two million to one. Despite not being a particularly cautious person when it came to the horses he selected, Craggs only bet 50p on his accumulator. He was kicking himself at the end of the day, however, when all of the horses came home. That said, a win of £1 million from a 50p bet probably didn’t disappoint him too much.
Foinavon Wins At Aintree
Whilst we’re talking about horse racing, it’s only right to speak about the event that produces more long-odds winner than any other. The Grand National is one of the jewels of the jump racing crown, matched only by the Cheltenham Gold Cup in terms of prestige. Part of the reason for the regard with which punters hold the National is the fact that it always feels like practically any horse can win; though even the most optimistic of bettors will have been shocked at the manner in which Foinavon took the crown in 1967.
Forty-four horses started the race and twenty-eight of them were still in it heading towards the twenty-third. At that point a loose horse veered across before the fence and struck Rutherfords, unseating the jockey and then involving several other horses. Before you knew it there was a melee in front of the fence and no horses could make it over. Foinavon was that far behind the front-runners, however, that the horse that you could have bet on at odds of 500/1 the day before avoided the confusion and romped home to make more than few punters very happy indeed.
England Stun The Australians
Few sporting events have the same sense of bad blood as the Ashes, with the two nations’ cricketers regularly getting involved in top-class sledging of each other. When the contest took place at Headingley in Leeds, England capitulated early and managed to rack up just 174 before being bowled. That came after Australia had put 401 runs up for nine wickets before declaring, putting themselves in a remarkably strong position and forcing the follow on. Things didn’t go much better in the second innings, with England finding themselves 135-7.
That was when Ian Botham decided to turn it on, getting to 149 not out and sending England on the way to a second innings total of 356 and setting the Australians a target of 530. Given they’d got over four hundred in the first innings without really breaking a sweat, few fancied the English to do anything other than crash and burn. Instead, Bob Willis managed to get eight wickets for just forty-three runs, resulting in the antipodeans picking up 111 in the second innings and losing by eighteen runs. At the end of the first innings, you’d have got odds of 500/1 on an England win, making it painful for the bookies at the same time it was awesome for everyone else.
Gerry McIlroy Has Faith In Rory
When Rory McIlroy was little more than a budding golfer in Northern Ireland, his father Gerry saw something in his play that caused him to have faith in his son’s ability. Goodness knows what the person working behind the till at Ladbrokes must have thought when he walked into their shop and asked them for odds on his fifteen-year-old son winning the British Open within ten years.
Regardless of what they thought, they would come to regret their generosity of odds of 500/1 on that happening. If it wasn’t bad enough that they let Gerry place the bet, they would take even more of a hit by allowing his mates to place the bet too. When Rory then went on to lift the Claret Jug at Royal Liverpool Golf Course on the Wirral in 2014, Gerry won £100,000 thanks to his £200 bet and his mates picked up £80,000 of their own.
Curtis Surprises Everyone With British Open Win
Speaking of golf, Ben Curtis wasn’t even remotely fancied when he lined up at Royal St George’s in the British Open back in 2003. The American hadn’t won any sort of tournament on the gold tour before and this was his first ever experience of a major.
The man himself certainly wasn’t intimidated by the bigger names on the course, playing some brilliant golf to finish the competition one under par and lifting the claret jug. Whilst he was absolutely delighted and the punters that backed him were pleased enough, the bookies who’d offered odds of 300/1 on him weren’t pleased to see their coffers take a hit.
Donald Trump Becomes President
Sports aren’t the only things that people like to bet on, nor are they the only activities that hold some surprises for the bookmakers. Speak to anyone about political shocks over the past few years and they’ll likely point to Brexit, yet Ladbrokes will tell you that the longest odds that they offered on Leave winning were 5/1. Perhaps the shock of that actually happening is what spurred on American voters to come out of the shadows to vote for a man who had been caught on tape telling Billy Bush that he had no problem ‘grabbing women by the p*ssy’.
Whatever the reason, few people expected Donald Trump, a man with zero political experience and who had mainly made his name by appearing on the television show The Apprentice, to actually win the US election in 2016. Hilary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, was one of the most qualified politicians ever to try to be elected to the highest office in the land. Perhaps it was her link to her husband Bill that stopped her from winning, or maybe it was just a matter of good old-fashioned sexism. Regardless of the reason, Trump’s win at one-time odds of 150/1 surpassed even Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader at 100/1 in terms of shocks for both bookmakers and political commentators.
Alonso Nets From Within His Own Half (Twice)
Everyone feels like a winning a long shot is something of a dream, but that’s literally true for Adrian Haywood. The Liverpool fan had a dream in 2005 that the Reds’ midfielder Xabi Alonso would score a goal from within his own half. He was that convinced that his dream had something behind it that he went to his local bookmakers and placed £200 on it happening with odds of 125/1.
Fast forward a year and Liverpool were up against Luton Town in the third round of the FA Cup. It turned out to be a proper battle, with Luton taking a 3-1 lead at their home ground. The Reds then went 4-3 ahead, causing Luton to push their goalkeeper up for a corner in the final minutes. Liverpool cleared it and it fell to Xabi Alonso, with the Spaniard netting from within his own half and Haywood netting a tasty profit from the bookies.
