The world’s strangest bets and their payouts
Ten years ago Gerry McIllroy placed a £200 bet on his son winning the Open golf championship. This summer he collected an impressive £100,000 when Rory lifted the Claret Jug. But he is not the only person to have collected on an outlandish bet. Here are some of the more unusual and weird bets which have been placed over the years.
On April 10th 1964, David Threlfall from Preston in the UK, placed a £10 bet that man would set foot on any heavenly body before January 1971. So impossible did bookmakers William Hill deem this feat that they offered him odds of a spectucular 1000/1. The odds tumbled for others who clamoured to place similar bets and Mr Threlfall was offered hundreds of pounds for his ticket as the Sixties progress. Nevertheless on 21st July 1969 when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, William Hill paid out £10,000 to Mr Threlfall is a special moon landing TV program. Later Mr Threlfall revealed that his win had not been such a huge punt after all. In 1963 he had heard a speech by President John Kennedy stating that there would be a moon landing before the end of the decade.
In 2008, Fred Craggs overcame odds of 2 million to one to win a cool million pounds when all 8 horses on his 50p accumulator romped home. Despite the fact bookmakers William Hill did not have to pay out more than 100,000 on his bet due to betting rules, they did the decent thing and paid Fred his full money. The agricultural worker vowed that his win would not change him and he would continue working in his job, although he may splash out on a holiday cottage in France.
The longest odds ever offered by a bookmaker was 20,000,000 to one on the odds of Elvis crashing a UFO into Loch Ness and hitting Nessie. Over the years this story has been altered to Elvis riding into town on Shergar and playing Lord Lucan in the final at Wimbledon. Needless to say, bookmakers William Hill are confident that they will never have to pay out on that bet.
A waiter from Malta managed a staggering 19 match football accumulator at odds of 683,000 to 1 and collected £570,000 when Liverpool beat Chelsea 2 -1 to complete his amazing run of luck.
The betting got totally out of hand in 2013 when Ugandan Arsenal fan Henry Dhabasani bet his friend Rashid Yiga that Arsenal would beat Manchester United one weekend. The stakes? Dhabasani bet his house whilst Yiga staked his Toyota Premio car and his wife! Unfortunately, Arsenal lost and Yiga duly arrived to claim his house, kicking Dhabasani’s three wives and five children out of the house.
