A retired accountant from North London has had an absolute fill-up after turning 20 pence into £457,067.52 via a six-leg horse racing accumulator bet.
The unnamed punter placed a total of £2.00 worth of bets across seven runners at the UK’s Newbury, Lingfield and Doncaster meetings last Friday.
When one of his horses Bendomingo ran fourth in a hurdle at Newbury, our soon-to-be hero turned his attentions elsewhere, thinking that his bet was as good as cooked. But as the multi-minded among us would know, a single loss is not fatal to such accumulator style bets.
And so it was that a still alive 10 pence each-way was parlayed across the other six combinations.
“I checked a couple of the early results on my tablet but then after seeing one of them had lost I thought I might have only been on for a couple of places, so didn’t bother to see how the rest of the horses had got on,” said the punter.
“The next thing I knew, someone from Ladbrokes was phoning me to congratulate me for winning nearly half a million quid and to ask how I’d like the money, and I had no idea what he was talking about.”
What the Ladbrokes employee was talking about was the fact that each of the remaining six horses had lobbed, so parlaying the humble “silver coin” wager into a monstrous, life-changing windfall.
Monfass (12/1) and McVicar (12/1) both greeted the judge at Doncaster, Pearl Spectre (10/1) and Boater (15/2) scored at Lingfield and Wishicould (14/1) and Dinsdale (6/1) both saluted at Newbury.
“I was completely speechless and I think it’s going to take a few days to sink in properly.”
The payout was boosted by a whopping £228,000 due to Ladbrokes Best Odds Guaranteed offering, with the punter having taken significant ‘unders’ on one runner but still being awarded its far more generous starting price.
Ladbrokes spokesperson Alex Donohue gave the winning punter a small clip for not keeping the faith and monitoring how his bet was going.
“We’re sure this is one bet our customer won’t be able to forget now and we couldn’t be happier to pay the winnings to a lifelong racing fan. We’re sure from now he’ll follow racing results more closely as they come in,” said Donohue.
www.punters.com.au
