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 At the end of every football season you hear about the little old lady who stuck 2 pounds on an accumulator with a UK bookmaker and managed to correctly pick the winners of 15 different leagues catapulting her to millionaire status.
I don’t usually pay much attention to these stories as personally I am not a huge fan of accumulators especially ones at such long odds but for the World Cup Cricket I have made an exception.
To give myself an interest throughout the competition I have tried to pick the top batsman and top bowler for a few of the countries. I have structured various bets around these with doubles and treble running but could not resist sticking R50 on the possibility that all 7 of them arrive.
The first is Sehwag for top Indian bat at odds of 5/2. The opener is off to a flyer and it’s a case of so far so good for leg 1. Next up is Zaheer Khan to be top Indian bowler at 9/4; he picked up a couple of sticks in the first match but trails one of his countrymen by a couple of wickets. Shane Watson my top Australian bat pick is off to a solid start and the remaining legs consist of Morkel top SA bowler at 3/1, Malinga top Sri Lankan bowler at 22/10, Pietersen top England bat at 7/2 and Amla top South African bat at 28/10.
All of them have realistic chances of arriving but the odds of them all doing so in this tournament are somewhere around 7500/1 and if they do my R50 wager will return in the region of R346 000.
I have been in this game long enough to know that I am probably going to end up R50 down (rather than 346k up) but I find myself dreaming of what I might do with the cash and I have already made promises to friends and family to the point that I may be better off financially were it not too arrive. Trips to Mauritius, holidays in the Drakensberg and the like have all been bandied about and if by some chance this bet is still alive come semi final time I won’t be the only one watching with interest.
Accumulators such as the one I have described above can be good fun and hey, they sure beat taking a Lotto ticket.
This article was written for the CitiGaming supplement of the Citizen Newspaper and was first published on the 24th of February 2011.
Brent Graham is a blogger on www.goodforthegame.co.za and presents a sports betting radio show every Thursday night from 22h00 – 22h30 on 1485AM Radio Today or Channel 169 of the DSTV Audio Bouquet and to get on his free weekly e-mail list just send a message to brent@goodforthegame.co.za titled “Best Bets”.
You can follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/brentgraham or get on his mailing list by dropping him a line at brent@goodforthegame.co.za
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