A £500000 Wager with William Hill

A William Hill spokesman recently confirmed that they took on their biggest ever wager. It isn’t clear whether this bet was made online or not but we know that it was for £500,000 and that the firm ending up paying out £100.000 on it.

This giant wager was made on the Grand National at Aintree and it is certainly for a huge sum of money but what other outrageous wagers have people made in the past?

Three Other Big Bets

An interesting bet which was also lodged with William Hill came when a 91 year old man from Devon called Arthur King Robinson wagered £500 that he would die by the end of the year. He did this to cover the amount of inheritance tax his wife would have to pay. He got given odds of 6-1 and lived until the end of the year, thereby losing his wager.    

You may have heard of Londoner Ashley Revell, who sold all of his belongings to place a bet in Las Vegas a few years back. He put $135,000 at the casino table and won, doubling his money in the process. He became quite famous for doing this and we can only imagine the feeling he had when the ball landed on red just as he had predicted.

Finally, a chap named Matthew Dumbrell put on a bet at odds of 1,000,000 – 1. What could possibly have given him such generous odds? Well, he wagered that life on Earth would cease to exist before 2000, so there wasn’t much chance of him ever collecting the win anyway.