With his miracle bet still alive, the punter then had to sweat on whether trainer Waller would actually start Buckaroo in the Cup or a different race this Saturday, a decision Waller described as 50-50 just last week.<\/p>\n
But Buckaroo is confirmed in Tuesday\u2019s field, perfectly drawn in barrier 12 and has superstar jockey Craig Williams on his back.<\/p>\n
He is rated a $9 win chance but, more importantly, just $3.50 to run in the top-three slot that the Auckland punter needs to secure his mammoth collect.<\/p>\n
With the final three legs of the extraordinary bet being in Futures markets, there is no \u201ccash-out\u201d option for the punter to take a lower return before the race \u2013 so his bet has to ride.<\/p>\n
The punter told TAB officials he has a very good reason for wanting to stay anonymous.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am buying enough beers if this wins without anybody else knowing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He admitted he was nervous when it was suggested Waller may choose to bypass the Cup with Buckaroo but has remained remarkably philosophical about the fun bet that has turned into a life-changer.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, I was convinced Waller was going to scratch it, but I think the owners … they must have twisted his arm,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut, you know, the whole thing\u2019s a lottery, eh?<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is like a lottery ticket.\u201d<\/p>\n
Multi-betting has become increasingly popular with punters who want to chase big-money wins for small outlays but 12-leg winning tickets are incredibly rare as only one leg needs to lose for the bet to fail.<\/p>\n
Nick Conway, the general nanager of trading for Entain Australia and New Zealand, the operators of the TAB, said: \u201cWe\u2019re bookies, we never like paying out this sort of money but if someone can turn $7 into more than $700,000 then all we can do is pay him his dues \u2013 and the $700,000!<\/p>\n
\u201cNo matter which way the bet goes for our punter, I hope he enjoys the best three minutes in Australasian sport.\u201d<\/p>\n
Michael Guerin wrote his first nationally published racing articles while still in school and started writing about horse racing and the gambling industry for the Herald as a 20-year-old in 1990. He became the Herald\u2019s Racing Editor in 1995 and covers the world\u2019s biggest horse racing carnivals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With his miracle bet still alive, the punter then had to sweat on whether trainer Waller would actually…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":113653,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[81045,81046,51,27496,6326,74255,124,10542,1861,14568,78,123,33321,111,43,139,69,90,1523,81043,3512,81044,1361,78287,15391,6202,102,80],"class_list":["post-113652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-81045","tag-81046","tag-auckland","tag-betting","tag-biggest","tag-collect","tag-could","tag-cup","tag-history","tag-horse","tag-in","tag-melbourne","tag-miracle","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-on","tag-over","tag-punter","tag-racing","tag-sweating","tag-that","tag-tuesdays","tag-wild","tag-wins","tag-with","tag-zealand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113652\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}