Football fan nets stunning £93,000 win from £2 bet
Dean Clay, a 48-year-old from Southampton, has picked up a cheque for almost £93,000, after placing a £2 bet on an accumulator and predicting the results of an unbelievable 14 football matches.
All but one of the games had finished in his favour by Sunday afternoon: he just needed a draw between Burnley and West Brom. He was so stressed out that he couldn't bring himself to watch, so he went to play golf instead.
He said: "When I heard Burnley were winning 2-0, I thought it was game over. I was on the 16th hole when all the boys from the club house came running down cheering and I knew I had won. I needed a stiff drink, I couldn't believe it. Things like this don't happen to ordinary people like me!"
He originally thought he had won £69,000, but a bonus from bookmakers Coral bumped it up to a fraction under £93,000. He said he has just bought a house and is expecting his first child, so the money could come in handy.
Accumulators
Accumulator bets can produce some astounding results, because they bring together a number of different bets - in this instance 14 of them. You are betting on the likelihood of getting all 14 right, which is so spectacularly unlikely that your odds are multiplied many times over. As a result, if somehow you get all your predictions correct, the potential winnings are huge.
The largest reported win of this kind in recent years was in 2011, when a man from Malta bet 85p on a 19-stake accumulator across Europe. He won against odds of 683,738/1 and took home over £585,000.
He was followed by a Ladbrokes punter from Berkshire who won a record sum for the firm in January 2011. He took home almost £273,000 after staking £2.50 on the results of nine football matches.
In third place was the gambler in May last year who won almost £210,000 after betting £16 on eleven horses at three different race meetings. The complex bet involved a series of 1p bets on a combination of the horses achieving different things. A spokeswoman for William Hill said: "This is one of the luckiest bets we've ever seen."
However, a story from January this year reflects the reality for the vast majority of people - that somewhere along the line one or more of your predictions goes against you, and you lose everything.
The anonymous gambler put a £10 bet on five winners in the FA Cup, with the potential to win £1 million if he got all the results correct. He beat the odds by predicting the first four (some of which were real upsets) but after Liverpool drew against Bolton in the final game, he lost the lot. To make matters even more distressing, he rejected the chance to cash out before the final game at £15,000.
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