Big Wins

The Tote’s Scoop 6 has been a very popular bet with punters and professional gamblers alike. In recent weeks, I’ve read three great publications to see in any had these bets where within their compass:

Dave Nevison’s A Bloody Good Winner (2007)

Patrick Veitch: Enemy Number One (2009)

Harry Findlay’s: Gambling For Life (2017)

For those who aren’t into their betting, the Scoop 6 takes place every Saturday. You have to pick six winners from half a dozen specified races in hope of winning either the entire pool or share of it.

The appeal of the Scoop 6 is that punters can literally win a fortune for a £2 bet. If the pool isn’t won, it is rolled over to the next Saturday. In fact, the biggest Scoop 6 rollover was £10,740,797. Craig Brazier, a bin cleaner, won a share of £1.3M, while others remained anonymous.

However, along with regular punters are professional gamblers who often form syndicates to buy thousands of perms, investing considerable money, hoping to win the entire pool or a share. If all the favourites win the pool will be small, but if a couple of outsiders pop up it will limit the number of winning tickets. Some of the syndicates have won and actually lost money! For that reason, many wait for a few rollovers so it is a bumper prize.

Take a look at three professional gamblers who won big with Scoop 6 & Jackpot payouts:

Dave Nevison:

5^th August, 2004.

With their final two selections Look At The Stars (16/1) and Mrs Moh (12/1) winning, Nevison and his partner, Mark, held one and a half tickets and a prize of £268,643.

Harry Findlay:

Findlay, Tony Bloom and Glen Gill staked big money in 2000 to win £2.2 million and Findlay the lion’s share. The Scoop 6 bet cost a colossal £184,000. As with so many professionals, they stake to the extreme and literally can’t afford not to get a winning ticket. Findlay said over the next two years he lost £1.5 million on the Scoop 6 and gave it all back.

Patrick Veitch:

April, 2001.

Veitch and his partners had a bumper win when collecting on a rollover of £512,000 and his share £312,958,95.

In conclusion, Scoop 6 & Jackpots are every punters dream and so it would seem with professional gamblers too. In fact, I suspect that some of these wins have involved all three big names. It’s a shame that probably Nevison and Findlay, although having major wins, probably lost money over the duration.

Those big pots could even tempt the biggest names in the game; professional gamblers.

Cashing out an accumulator bet or, in other words, getting money back – albeit less than might otherwise be the case – before the bet has finished, inevitably has its pros and cons. However, one punter for whom cashing out worked just perfectly was the anonymous Betfair customer who, on Boxing Day, 2016, staked just £1 on a speculative, 21-fold accumulator on British football matches.

Two of his chosen matches were evening kick-offs but, when Olivier Giroud scored a header on his first league start of the season for Arsenal against West Bromwich Albion after 86 minutes, he was ahead in all 19 matches already underway. At that point, although he stood to collect a potential £1.2 million on his ‘all or nothing’ bet, he decided not to push his luck any further and immediately cashed out for the not insubstantial sum of £223,000.

Lo and behold, just four minutes later, Wycombe Wanderers’ winger Myles Weston scored his first goal for the club against Plymouth Argyle to level the scores at 3-3 after 90 minutes as the away team fought back from 3-1. The scoreline remained 3-3 at full-time, thereby rendering the bet worthless, so our intrepid punter had reason to feel well satisfied with his decision. For the record, of his two remaining selections, Manchester City completed a routine 3-0 away win against Hull City, but Newcastle United were beaten 1-0 at home by Sheffield Wednesday.

Keen to promote the benefits of cashing out to punters – the mechanism can, of course, benefit bookmakers, too – Betfair spokesperson Naomi Totten said, ‘Cash Out gives customers the ultimate control over their bets and this is surely the mother of all Cash Outs from the mother of all accumulators.’

We’ve covered a number of multiples / accumulator big wins on the site, listing many of them here. It’s not all win, win, win though and so when a read about a recent near miss, I thought to include it here.

This week an unlucky punter missed out on a staggering £340,000 when his scoop6 bet fell just short on bagging him the six figure sum. It was all going so well. The final leg of the scoop6 wasn’t even an outsider, instead of was favourite Growl, available at 4-1. Growl, running in the Ayr Gold Cup got off to a good start, was was eventually beaten by a length due to an impressive run from Tom Eaves, Brando.

Had Growl won the unlucky punter would’ve won the grand sum of £190,424 as well as a cool £150,000 bonus from Scoop6 operator Betfred. Of course as the old saying goes “you win some, you lose some”, but this must have been a particularly difficult loss to suffer for one unlucky man!