Wins

Apparently, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again’ was originally a maxim used to encourage American schoolchildren to do their homework. However, the importance of not giving up too easily was highlighted by an anonymous Coral punter who, in April, 2017, staked £19 on a permed accumulator bet and won £822,972.75 or, in other words, the highest horse racing payout the bookmaking firm has made since it was established in 1926.

The unidentified man, believed to be from Leicester, made five selections at the home of Irish jump racing, Punchestown, in Co. Kildare, and combined them in five £3 four-folds and one £4 five-fold. Das Mooser, about whom he had taken 10/1, set the ball rolling when making all to win the hunter chase, on his debut under National Hunt rules, at half those odds and was followed, in quick succession, by Woodland Opera, at 9/2, in the novice chase and Definite Ruby, at 7/1, in the mares’ handicap chase. Just over an hour later, Bacardys, at 10/1, beat favourite Finian’s Oscar by a short head to win the Tattersalls Ireland Champion Novice Hurdle and, later in the evening, Canardier – backed at 33/1, but sent off at just 8/1 – completed the clean sweep by winning the flat race.

Not that our intrepid punter was aware of any of the goings-on at Punchestown, having headed off for a night out. However, he did eventually check the racing results in the early hours of the following morning and later described his life-changing win as ‘the realisation of a lifetime dream’. Apparently, the man, who is the son of a bookmaker, had been placing similar bets, in the form of trebles and accumulators, on a daily basis for the previous twenty years but, in his own words, ‘kept hitting the woodwork’.

Even back in 2008, fifty pence was less than the price of a loaf of bread, or a pint of milk, but that was the amount staked by Fred Craggs, a fertiliser salesman from Thirsk, North Yorkshire, who would subsequently become the first ‘betting shop millionaire’. The day before his sixtieth birthday, in February, 2008, Craggs placed an eight-fold accumulator on horse races at Sandown Park, Nad Al Sheba, Warwick and Wolverhampton at his local William Hill betting shop. Fittingly, under the floodlights at Gosforth Park that evening, his eighth and final selection, A Dream Come True, won at 2/1 to land cumulative odds of nearly 2,800,000/1.

Craggs remained blissfully unaware of his good fortune until the following day, when he visited another William Hill betting shop in nearby Bedale. Having placed another five bets, each worth fifty pence, as was his custom, he asked staff to check his betting slip from the previous day. Craggs apparently visibly paled when informed that his total winnings were exactly £1,000,000 – subject to maximum payout rules, but nonetheless unprecedented in the history of British betting shops – but later said that he had experienced only a ‘dull sensation of excitement about the win’. William Hill spokesman David Hood was, thankfully, a little more upbeat, saying, ‘It is a staggering bet, and earns him a place in history as the world’s first betting shop millionaire. Even a scriptwriter couldn’t have dreamt this one up.’

Lanfranco ‘Frankie’ Dettori earned a reputation as the punters’ friend when, way back in 1996, he went through the card at the Festival of British Racing at Ascot and cost the bookmaking industry, as a whole, in excess of £40 million. The popular Italian jockey hasn’t achieved anything of quite the same magnitude since but, at Royal Ascot in 2019, had the bookmakers running for cover once again.

Having ridden a double on the Wednesday, Dettori proceeded to ride the first four winners on the Thursday and only narrowly missed out on a five-timer when Turgenev – backed from an early price of 12/1 to 7/2 favourite – was worn down and headed in the final fifty yards of the Britannia Stakes. However, in a move that Ben Keith, owner of Star Sports, later described as ‘utterly pathetic’, Bet365 and Sky Bet subsequently ‘knocked back’ multiple bets on horses ridden by Dettori on the final two days of the Royal Meeting.

Bet365 refused some four-fold and all five-fold accumulators on both Friday and Saturday, while Sky Bet refused any multiple bet that included Dettori’s three longest-priced mounts on Saturday. Matt Bisogno, outgoing chair of the Horseracing Bettors Forum, speculated that bookmakers were treating multiple bets on Dettori as a ‘related contigency’, but Keith was much stronger in his condemnation of the action, suggesting that ‘Joe Coral, William Hill and Cyril Stein must have been turning in their graves when the story came out.’ In any event, Dettori spared the blushes of Bet365 and Sky Bet, by riding just a single winner, Advertise, on Friday and Saturday.

Notwithstanding the significant increase in the number of runners that are sent off at triple-figure prices in recent years, in British horse racing winners at odds of 150/1 are still hardly an everyday occurrence. However, one such ‘shock’ winner, The Meter, a once-raced juvenile trained by Mohamed Moubarak, did pop up in a small fillies’ novice stakes race at Chelmsford on the evening of October 25, 2018.

From a betting perspective, The Meter was all the more remarkable for being the first selection of an anonymous Newcastle punter, who placed a permed accumulator bet, known as a ‘Lucky 63’ – which comprises singles, doubles, trebles, four-folds, five-folds and a six-fold – on six selections at the Essex track. He managed to couple his initial 150/1 with Dollar Value at 14/1 and Full Intention at 12/1 before his fourth selection, Rampant Lion, beat only one home in the mile handicap. Nevertheless, his winning streak resumed with It’s Not Unusual at 8/1 in the next race and rounded off with Victoria Drummond at 14/1, for five winners from six selections.

The five-fold alone paid cumulative odds of 3,975,074/1 and, for a modest total stake of £6.30, the bet, which was placed in a Coral betting shop in Throckley, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, returned a mammoth £544,767.90. Coral spokesman David Stevens, speaking before the unidentified punter had returned to the shop to collect his winnings, hailed the selection of long-priced winners as ‘one of the most spectacular winning bets we have ever seen’.

Bookmakers are always keen to advertise that fact that one of their punters has won a five-figure or six-figure sum for a relatively small stake, because multiple bets – that is, doubles, trebles and accumulators – are excellent money-spinners. By contrast, singles are the least profitable area of business for bookmakers, so they are much less likely to advertise the fact that a punter has won, say, £10,000 with a single at even money. Similarly, it is not without good reason that bookmakers offer double, treble, four times or even five times the odds for a single winner in multiple bets such as the ‘Lucky 15’, ‘Lucky 31’ and ‘Lucky 63’ and bonuses of 10%, 20% and 25% on all-correct versions of the same bets.

However, while multiple bets, by definition, introduce increased risk, every so often a punter manages to string together a series of winners, at working man’s prices, and collects a decent sum of money. The Cheltenham Festival, for example, is considered one of the most difficult meetings of the year at which to find one winner, never mind four on the same day. Nevertheless, on the second day of the 2019 Festival, when results were more ‘punter friendly’ than is often the case, an anonymous Boylesports punter did just that and collected a total of €10,410.69 for his €120 stake.

The unidentified Meath man combined Ballymore Novices’ Hurdle winner City Island, at 8/1, with RSA Chase winner Topofthegame, at 7/2, Fred Winter Juvenile Novices’ Handicap Hurdle winner Band Of Outlaws, at 5/1, and Weatherbys Champion Bumper winner Envoi Allen, at 4/1, in a €4 each-way Lucky 15 at his local betting shop. Boylesports spokesman acknowledged the win, saying that ‘this customer in Meath has brought us right back down to earth with a bang’.