5,000-1 is stupid in any sport - when the odds for Kim Kardashian to become president of the United States is 1,000-1. Those limey bookies aren't going to put out such ridiculous odds again...
Those who bet -- or didn't and wish they had -- on Leicester City, by Darren Rovell
It is the summer of 2015.
The Premier League is gearing up for a new season and the oddsmakers are crunching numbers in their London offices, coming up with the first future odds that they hope will lure bettors to wager on teams for the next campaign.
Near the bottom of the 2014-15 standings were the Foxes of Leicester City, in their first year back in the Premier League after an 11-year absence. Thanks to winning seven of their last nine games, they were saved from relegation.
"They escaped by the skin of their teeth, and all signs for us had them pointing towards relegation again for this season," said David Williams of Ladbrokes, a betting company whose roots can be traced back to 1886.
Bookies try to come up with odds to get people to bet on this sorry team, which was entering its 48th season in England's top division. Leicester's best finish was as runner-up in 1928-29.
So Ladbrokes sets the odds of the Foxes winning the 2015-16 title at 5,000-1. Ladbrokes' biggest competitor, William Hill, concurs.
(For comparison, if you ever thought Kim Kardashian would become president of the United States, you could have gotten those odds for 1,000-1.)
The 5,000-1 odds on Leicester are available through August, with Ladbrokes taking 47 bets at the highest odds while William Hill wrote 25 bets.
Leigh Herbert
Herbert is a 39-year-old carpenter who attended his first Leicester City game in the late 1980s. Immediately, he was hooked.
Like many teams, Leicester's recent history has been marked by promotion and relegation, the coming up and falling down common to soccer teams, when every season is a fight to stay relevant.
Despite the temptations to bet -- there are betting shops with kiosks everywhere you look in Leicester's city center -- Herbert never really was tempted, except for his annual wager each year on the Grand National, a steeplechase horse race that takes place in Liverpool.
But what he heard on Aug. 5, 2015 was just too tempting: He was told the Leicester City team was 5,000-1 to win the title. So that night, he downloaded William Hill's app to his phone, funded the account and put one pound on the bet.
After starting the season as 5,000-1 underdogs, Chalk's James Eastham looks at five key turning points over the 2015-16 Premier League season for bettors backing Leicester City.
Moments later, he erased the one pound and replaced it with a five-pound bet ($7.31 using today's exchange rate).
Little did he know that quick thinking could change his life.
"I was a bit drunk at the time," Herbert now admits. "So no, of course I didn't think they were actually going to win the league."
As the season goes on, Leicester City is playing well. By Christmas, the Foxes have somehow lost only one of their first 17 matches (a 5-2 defeat to Arsenal on Sept. 26). They are the best team in the league.
On Feb. 6, after a shocking 3-1 victory at Manchester City, fans start a new chant:
"We're gonna win the league, we're gonna win the league, we know you don't believe us, we know you don't believe us, we're gonna win the league!"
Herbert couldn't believe the position he was in. He was in line to win $36,500.
It was around that time that Herbert also started paying attention to something that showed up in connection to his bet on Leicester. It was called "cash-out value."
It's a common practice in England for bookies, if they face significant risk, to offer bettors a buyout plan. It's an automatic program that offers a bettor the chance to immediately take the cash at a discount reflective of a bet's current odds to pay out.
The cash-out numbers kept going up and Herbert kept resisting. That was until April 1. With Leicester up five points on second-place Tottenham with seven matches to play, William Hill was offering him $21,191 for his bet, which represented 58 percent of the total value if he won the bet at season's end.
"I thought, at that point, we were going to win, but it was too costly to lose it all," Herbert said.
So he made a deal with the bookmaker. He cashed out two pounds of his five-pound bet at a 55 percent payout. Herbert saw $8,300 pumped into his account.
He'll use the money as a deposit on a house, he says, which he'll now buy before he marries his fianc?e, Kerry.
With Leicester clinching the title, Herbert will get another $21,918 for a total payoff of $30,218, or a return on his investment of more than 425,000 percent over a 270-day period.
And he says he doesn't regret the $6,332 he left on the table from making the first deal.
