A glut of goals during the weekend’s Football League action proved profitable for a Betfair punter who landed nearly £3k from a 10-fold £5 accumulator.
The bettor selected 10 Football League matches from Saturday’s 3pm kick-offs and backed both teams to score (BTTS) in each game, rolled into one acca.
As it turned out, there was no fingernail chewing needed or desperate prayers for a last-minute goal.
By the 70th minute of the afternoon’s selected games only Ipswich, who were losing 3-0 at Leicester, had failed to score.
Swedish midfielder Jens Cajuste then intercepted a weak pass from Leicester goalkeeper Jakub Stolarczyk to slot home.
It was a consolation goal for Ipswich and under pressure manager Kieran McKenna, but a big winner for the Betfair punter, sealing a return of £2,907.17 on their original £5 bet.
The Winning 10-game BTTS Accumulator
The matches chosen were split as evenly as possible through the divisions.
The punter selected three games from the Championship, four from League One and the final three from League Two.
Championship: Birmingham vs Charlton, Leicester vs Ipswich, Wrexham vs Watford.
League One: Barnsley vs Orient, Blackpool vs Lincoln, Bolton vs Exeter, Peterborough vs Northampton.
League Two: Gillingham vs Barrow, MK Dons vs Cambridge, Walsall vs Shrewsbury.
Three of the matches had delivered by half-time with goals from both teams in Wrexham at home to Watford in the Championship, and the League One games between Barnsley and Orient and Blackpool at home to Lincoln.
With an hour gone the punter still needed goals from six of the 20 teams involved, but in a golden 10-minute period five of those sides obliged.
Substitute Sam Dalby’s 70th-minute equaliser for Derby at home to Exeter in League One left Ipswich as the only team firing blanks.
Within a minute, Cajuste stepped in to score one of the softest goals of the afternoon and the sweetest for the Betfair customer.
Biggest UK Accumulator Wins Of All Time
While pocketing nearly £3,000 from a £5 accumulator is tough enough to pull off, it doesn’t come close to matching two of the most impressive wins.
The biggest returns on accumulators are on horse racing, where there are obviously multiple possible winners from each race.
Fertiliser salesman Fred Craggs popped into his local William Hill shop in Thirsk in 2008 to place a 50p eight-fold accumulator on the horses.
His selections produced eye-watering odds of 2,800,000-1.
The Yorkshireman ticked off all eight selections correctly, including a race in Dubai, to become the country’s first betting shop millionaire.
His winnings exceeded William Hill’s cap so he had to settle for walking away with £1 million on what was his 60th birthday.
The biggest UK accumulator win ever is credited to Steve Whiteley, who landed nearly £1.5 million from the Tote at Exeter Racecourse in March 2011.
The heating engineer placed a £2 bet with the Tote Jackpot on six horses and scooped the entire pot after being the only person to call all six correctly.
What made his win all the more remarkable, or annoying depending on your viewpoint, is that Whiteley declared afterwards that he was “not a horseracing man”.
He also admitted that he had no idea that his sixth and final selection had not won in 28 previous attempts over the hurdles.
