Punter wins £12,000 on £2.20 accumulator
It's not just the lottery that can net you tens of thousands of pounds from a stake of just a couple of quid: one lucky punter has managed just that through an accumulator bet on a series of football matches across Europe.
The twenty-leg accumulator, placed with Ladbrokes, cost the person just £2.20, but brought in winnings of £12,095.94. It's the first 20-leg accumulator that the bookmaker's paid out on this season.
The odds ranged from 1/33 to 10/11.
"We take our hat off to our man as he becomes the first football fan to land a monster 20 leg acca this season," says Ladbrokes' Alex Donohue. "It's no mean feat picking that many winners across the world on the same day."
The final result that sealed the deal was a goal in Portugal that came in injury time. Rio Ave's defender Rafa Soares scored only his second career top flight goal to seal the victory.
"With results around the globe going his way the hero of the day came in the most unlikely shape of an on-loan defender at a mid-table Portuguese side," says Donohue. "We're sure plenty of people in Bolton are raising a glass to Rafa Soares this Bank Holiday weekend."
Of course, the odds of correctly predicting the results of 20 diferent games in a row are astronomical - but sometimes people make even more. Last year, for example, a Cambridgeshire man won nearly £170,000 from a single £1 bet - just a week after setting up his first bookmaker's account.
And William Hill says it once paid out £1 million to a man who'd placed a 50p accumulator bet on the results of eight horse races.
But before you get too excited, it's worth remembering all the accumulator bets that fail to pay off - sometimes only on the very last leg.
Last year, for example, a punter narrowly missed out on winning with a £10 accumulator bet on five FA cup matches that would have netted him £1 million if all five had come off.
He got four of the five right, but missed out on the last one - and to make matters worse, had rejected the chance to cash out before that final game, which would at least have brought him £15,000.
How yesterday's bet stacked up:
Manchester City 3-1 West Ham (2/7)
Las Palmas 5-1 Granada (17/20)
Athletic Bilbao 0-1 Barcelona (4/7)
New York Red Bulls 1-0 New England Revolution (1/2)
Genk 1-0 Zulte Waregem (10/11)
AZ Alkmaar 2-0 NEC Nijmegen (4/9)
Rio Ave 1-0 CD Feirense (17/20)
Achilles 29 2-3 MVV Maastricht (1/33)
IFK Goteborg 2-0 Helsingborgs (3/5)
Orebro 3-2 Falkenbergs (4/9)
Sundsvall GIF 0-1 Malmo FF (10/21)
Lech Poznan 2-0 Piast Gliwice (4/6)
Oleksandria 4-0 Zirka Kirovohrad (3/4)
Ruch Chorzow 0-2 Legia Warsaw (4/5)
Stal Dniprodzerzhynsk 0-1 Shakhtar Donetsk (1/4)
Viktoria Plzen 3-1 Slavia Praha (13/20)
Anzi Makhachkala 0-2 Spartak Moscow (17/20)
River Plate 4-1 Banfield (13/20)
Akropolis 5-1 Enskede (3/10)
Cruzeiro EC 2-0 Santa Cruz PE (2/5)
