Stupid Bets - Real Bets That Make You Wonder
We've already covered weird wagers, but would you bet everything you own on one spin of roulette? A few years ago an Englishman named Ashley Revell did exactly that: to facilitate one of the most stupid bets ever, he sold everything he owned, converted it to cash, and traveled to Las Vegas. The wager was $135,300 on red. The ball bounced around a bit after slanting down into the wheel, and finally settled … on red! Talk about luck.
Wagering on the Game: Online Sports Betting
The Super Bowl is one of the biggest betting events in Nevada, with millions of dollars in online sports bets being placed on different aspects of the game each year. But it’s the “proposition” or side bets that are fascinating: you can bet on whether a streaker will dash across the field. You can bet on which song the performing artiste will sing to kick off the halftime show. The stupid bets even include whether the coin toss will turn up heads or tails, not bad odds necessarily, but pretty silly nonetheless.
Stupid Bets By Sports Players Themselves
A few years ago basketball great Shaquille O’Neal and an entourage member bet that Shaq was so famous he could drop by the White House unannounced and get in. The stakes were 1000 push-ups. The result? After a couple of tries, Shaq owed somebody some pushups.Tennis player Andy Roddick and syndicated radio personality Bobby Bones also made a weird bet after Bones suggested on air that there’s nothing hard about returning a serve. Bones lost in amusing fashion – he never came close to touching a ball, except for the last serve, which nearly beheaded him.
More Crazy and Stupid Bets
Imagine betting on the discovery of the Loch Ness monster (500-1) or about the Second Coming (1000-1). Novelty bettors don’t seem to care what the bad odds are – they will place their wagers anyway. Under the stewardship of Graham Sharpe, English bookmakers William Hill have taken bets on some of the craziest events, and they cater to a wide cross section of evangelical Christians, crypto-zoologists and madcap conspiracy theorists.Back in the 1990s, William Hill also took bets that the world would end at 12:50 p.m. on August 11, 1999 at odds of 1,000,000/1. Apparently that did not happen – but it would have been tricky to collect the winnings on that one. Put this on the list of stupid bets we assume people didn’t really go for, along with the next one.
In 2002 Ian MacMillan from Devon, England, took world record odds of 20 million to one that Elvis Presley would ride into London and play tennis at Wimbledon.
