Wins

Snooker is a popular sport for accumulator betting, not least because, unlike in some other sports, no draw, tie or dead-heat is possible. Furthermore, on the World Snooker Tour there are more tournaments than ever before and most of them start with all 128 players in a ‘flat’ draw structure, so there are plenty of matches to choose from. Of course, even the leading players can face tough assignments from the first round onwards, but there are invariably some value bets to be found.

One notable example of a successful snooker accumulator was a 15-fold roll-up on first-round matches in the Hong Rui Ma Yushan World Open, in China, in August, 2018. An anonymous Somerset punter staked £100 with Ladbrokes, via a BetStation, or self-service betting terminal, and won £100,124.82 after all of his selections prevailed.

Twelve of them, including the likes of Ali Carter, Marco Fu, Barry Hawkins and Stephen Maguire were odds-on, in some cases long odds-on, but the punter did manage to ‘dodge a bullet’ by leaving out home favourite Liang Wenbo, who crashed to a 5-1 defeat by 22-year-old James Cahill. At slightly more generous odds, the Welsh pair of Jamie Jones and Jak Jones was victorious at even money and 8/5, respectively, while Irishman Fergal O’Brien also won his first-round match at 11/8. Ladbrokes spokesperson Jessica Bridge acknowledged the bet as ‘the biggest snooker accumulator win we’ve ever seen placed on a BetStation’.

‘Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it’, or so wrote nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. However, there was nothing hasty about the punter who placed a year-long 12-fold accumulator on various major sporting events in 2018/19, although his bet did eventually boil down to a rather breathless Sunday afternoon and evening in southwest and northwest London.

By that stage, the intrepid punter had already chalked up ten winning selections, including Europe in the Ryder Cup at 11/10, Liverpool to finish in the top two in the Premier League at 8/11 and MK Dons to finish in the top seven in League Two at 1/3, to name but three. However, on Sunday, July 14, 2019, he still required defending champion Novak Djokovic, at 7/2, to win the Men’s Singles Final at Wimbledon and England, at 5/2, to win the Cricket World Cup Final at Lord’s.

After nearly five hours play, Djokovic finally defeated Roger Federer 13-12 in the fifth and final set after a tiebreak. Over at Lord’s, almost as if the betting gods knew a huge sum of money was at stake – the punter stood to collect £258,000 for his initial outlay of £650 – the agony continued. Set a total of 242 to win outright, England scored 14 runs from their final over and tied the New Zealand score of 241, resulting in a so-called ‘Super Over’ to decide the result. Remarkably, after a further six balls apiece, both teams had scored 15 runs and were still tied.

However, the International Cricket Council (ICC) tournament playing conditions stated that, in the event of a tie, the team that hit the most boundaries during their innings, including the Super Over, would be declared the winner. Thankfully, at least for our punter, England hit nine more boundaries than New Zealand, so became Cricket World Cup Winners for the first time.

An anonymous Manchester United fan from Lichfield, Staffordshire was, no doubt, disappointed when his team were beaten 3-1 on aggregate by Bayern Munich in the quarter-finals of the UEFA Champions League in 2000/01. However, the same fan had cause for rapturous celebration when ‘Die Bayern’ edged out Valencia 5-4 in a tense penalty shootout at the San Siro in Milan, Italy the following month to become European champions.

In so doing, Bayern Munich completed a 15-fold ante-post accumulator, placed the previous August, which also included the winners of the Premier League, Championship, League One, League Two and National League among various other football, cricket and rugby selections. The accumulator paid an eye-watering 1,666,666/1 – believed to be a world record, in terms of a football-related payout by a British bookmaker – so, for his modest £0.30 stake, the self-employed businessman collected £500,000. Previously, the most profitable football bet in British history was the £400,000 won by Solihull florist Adrian Fitzpatrick, albeit for a much larger stake, at the 1994 World Cup.

It was not the first time that the same punter had won a six-figure sum from the same William Hill betting shop, having previously netted £157,000 for a £2.50 stake when Manchester United won the UEFA Champions League two years previously. At that time, he boldly told betting shop staff, ‘I’m going to do you again’, and so he did. Manageress Janet Dykes, who paid out on both bets, likened his most recent success to ‘winning the Lottery twice’.

Nowadays, the ITV 7 is a free-to-play competition offered by ITV in partnership with Sky Bet, but has its origins in the previous incarnation of ITV Racing, shown as part of ‘World of Sport’ from the early Seventies onwards. Although no longer an accumulator in the traditional sense, the basic concept remains the same; viewers are required to predict the winners of all seven selected races to win a prize of up to £100,000. Of course, picking seven winners, especially on a competitive, televised card, is no mean feat and cumulative odds regularly run to tens, or even hundreds, of thousands to one.

The ITV 7 may be free to enter, but the huge number of entries often leads to multiple winners, who share the jackpot prize. Consequently, many punters supplement their promotional bet with a small-stakes accumulator, of the traditional type – that is, settled at starting price, early price or board price, at the discretion of the punter – so that, if they do strike it lucky, they are guaranteed a mammoth payday, regardless of the number of winning tickets in the ITV 7.

However, even so, punters still need to pay attention to the prices on offer from the bookmaker with whom they place their accumulator bet; betting at multiple odds means that a point, or half a point, here and there can quickly translate into a shortfall of hundreds of thousands of pounds in the final payout. Indeed, on Betfair Hurdle Day, 2019, odds comparison service Oddschecker calculated that the difference between the best and worst odds on offer for each of the winners of the ITV 7 races – although, individually, never more than a single point – translated into a deficit of over £375,000 on a 7-fold accumulator to a £1 stake.

The final day of the Premier League football season inevitably produces one or two surprise results, as an exhausting campaign takes it toll and players with little, or nothing, to play for have one eye on the beach. The closing round of fixtures in 2018/19 was no exception, with perhaps the biggest surprise of all coming at Old Trafford, where a brace of goals by Cardiff City winger Nathaniel Mendez-Laing saw the already-relegated Welsh club record their first win over Manchester United since 1954.

Elsewhere, some results went according to form. Manchester City and Liverpool both won, against Brighton and Wolves, respectively, to confirm their positions as the top two in the Premier League, while Arsenal won their final game, against Burnley, for the eighth season running, to finish fifth and qualify for the Europa League. Less readily predictable, perhaps, were draws between Spurs and Everton, Leicester and Chelsea and Southampton and Huddersfield.

Nevertheless, all seven results, along with three more, were correctly predicted by an anonymous Derbyshire punter, who staked £5 on a ten-fold accumulator with Paddy Power and duly won £117,485.16 at cumulative odds of 23,496/1. The results may not have taken the punter unawares but, having neglected, for whatever reason, to check the outcome of his bet until ten days later, discovering that he was over £117,000 richer almost certainly. A Paddy Power spokesman likened his windfall to ‘finding a winning lottery ticket down the back of the sofa.’