Ascot Punter's Fiver Fortune

[Nevets77]

Page 12 of THE SUN Saturday, June 21, 2008

I quote, "A pensioner has scooped £272,000 at Royal Ascot - with a bet of just £5. His picks were:

South Central at 11-4
Michita at 100-30
Yeats at 11-8
Fifteen Love at 28-1
Collection at 13-2
Colony at 11-2.
The combined odds were 54,500-1"

I can work out the 54,500 * 5 = £272,500 but I can't work out how the 54,000-1 is being obtained.:headbange

Sorry I am a novice punter or professional gambler. Printed 2 free books from Keith Driscoll "Professional Gambling Make Easy" and "Van Der Wheil Method". Read through them twice but still take time to understand and know how to implement them. The information is too much. It is a steep learning curve.

I thought the article in THE SUN should be something for the laymen and yet I couldn't understand it. Can somebody explain?:Helooo. Obviously, I am new.

[Win2Win]

I had all those winners as well :)

[mathare]

The guy obviously had these bets in a stupid accumulator. OK, it paid out but he was a tad fortunate about it.

The easiest way (at least I find it easiest) to work out the odds of an acca is:

1) Add 1 to all odds to make them decimal odds
2) Multiply them all together
3) Subtract 1 again to get fractional odds.

So we have 15/4 * 130/30 * 19/8 * 29/1 * 15/2 * 13/2 = 54561.9.... or 54560/1

[Nevets77]

The guy obviously had these bets in a stupid accumulator. OK, it paid out but he was a tad fortunate about it.

The easiest way (at least I find it easiest) to work out the odds of an acca is:

1) Add 1 to all odds to make them decimal odds
2) Multiply them all together
3) Subtract 1 again to get fractional odds.

So we have 15/4 * 130/30 * 19/8 * 29/1 * 15/2 * 13/2 = 54561.9.... or 54560/1

Thank you for your kind reply. I still cannot figure it out, although I can see how the £54560 is obtained now. Can you please show me how by betting £5 on South Central at 11-4 how much did he get? and then £5 bet on Michita at 100-30 how much did he get and so on...

Also what do you mean by accumulator and acca? I am sure other can benefit from your answers.:happyboun

Many thanks in advance.

[TheGoodGuy]

Hi Nevets,

Where Mat refers to 'acca' & 'accumulator' these are one & the same thing

An accumulator is a multiple bet. A single stake is used to generate two or more bets with the intent of passing the winnings of the first race on to the following race selected, and so on.
All the selections made must win for you to win the accumulator.
Put simply.....the punter makes a series of selections each from a different race or event. Every time a selection wins, the stake plus winnings is put onto the next selection. If any selection loses, the whole bet is lost.

Now.....£5 bet on South Central at odds of 11/4 would return a (11/4*5 = £13.75) profit plus your £5 stake.......a total return of £18.75.

As this bet is an accumulator.......the £18.75 returned from the first bet is the stake that is put on race 2.
So an £18.75 stake on Michita at odds of 100/30 returns a profit of £62.50 (100/30*18.75), plus your £18.75 stake.......a total return of £81.25.

The £81.25 is the stake that goes on race 3.........& so on.

Hope this makes sense.

Ada. :thumbs

[mathare]

Can you please show me how by betting £5 on South Central at 11-4 how much did he get? and then £5 bet on Michita at 100-30 how much did he get and so on...He had £5 on South Central at 11/4 so that give him a return of £5 * 15/4 = £18.75, including his £5 stake. He then had all of this staked on the next horse so £18.75 * 130/30 = £81.25 all of which went on the next horse and so on.


Also what do you mean by accumulator and acca? I am sure other can benefit from your answers.:happybounAcca is just short for accumulator. It means this guy bet on all those horses to win but he needs every single one of them to win for him to get any sort of return. Picking winners can be hard enough but picking 6 in a row is very difficult. If any of those horses had been beaten, even by a nose, he would have lost his fiver. And that's what happens to over 99% of punters who place these bets. They are going for a big win from a small stake not realising the odds of it actually coming in are massive.

Also think about your normal stakes on a horse. I don't know about you but £5 on a horse seems OK to me. And that's how this guy started. Then he had £18.75 on the second horse. Then £81.25 on the third horse. Now I'm getting a little out of my comfort zone. But it was Yeats so maybe he was confident of a win there giving him £192.68 on the next horse. Nearly £200 on a horse that is 28/1! Sure, it won so fair play to him and all that but would you have put £200 on a longshot like that? He then has £5596.09 on his next runner. Five and a half grand on a 13/2 shot.... Then he puts nearly £42k (£41970.70 to be exact) on an 11/2 shot and ends up with over £272000. Well done and all but he started with £5 on one horse. Had he done these horse by horse would he have had the balls to put £42000 on the last horse? Because that's what he ended up doing...

[Nevets77]

Thank you all for the very clear answer. This guy must be one hell of a predictor!

[mathare]

Thank you all for the very clear answer. This guy must be one hell of a predictor!He's just lucky. Bookies make a lot of money from guys like this, and there are a lot of people who do these sorts of bets and they are welcomed with open arms by the bookmakers. Sure, Mr Bookie has just paid out over a quarter of a million but he has got a lot of publicity over it and that means many more casual punters will see someone turn a fiver into a fortune and try the same thing.

The bet had huge odds and so a very small chance of winning but place enough bets and one of them will come in. And there will be plenty of these sort of bets being placed up and down the country every day, more so at weekends and big racing festivals, so someone is bound to get one up at some point.

One reason the bookies love it is because of the profit they make on these bets. Bookmakers operate to make a profit on every race. They do this by pricing up the various runners such that if they attract the money in the right ratio across the horses they will guarantee themselves a profit. They do this by offering odds that don't reflect the true chances of an event happening. Take a simple 50-50 example such as tossing a fair coin. It has an equal chance of being heads or tails so you might expect to get evens (1/1) on each event. But a bookie would probably price both heads and tails up at 5/6, less than the fair price. That means if they attract equal amounts of support for heads and tails they are guaranteed a profit. If they attract more interest for tails, say, then they will shorten the price on tails and lengthen the odds on heads to try and redress the balance by making one more attractive to the punters than the other. And that's how they work with horses too. A bookie may have a guaranteed profit of 10% of turnover on a given race, known as a 10% overround.

Now suppose the bookie has a 10% overround on all six of the races that his guy won above. Using the same sort of maths as we did earlier we see the total overround is 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 = 1.771561 or 77% overround on the whole bet. That's a huge margin. The more selections in the multiple bet the larger the bookies profit margin