Welcome to another edition of
OFF-TRACK with A-TRAIN
where I report on the weird and the wacky
in the world of wrestling
in this episode
He Bet How Much and Won HOW MUCH?
Do you know what a parlay is?
No, not that kind of parlay, you silly pirate.
A parlay in betting.
It's where you basically place bets on several events at once with the same bet, but you only win money if all of them pay off. And the more bets you make with that same bet, the better the payoff will be.
For example, you can place a bet of $10 on the fact that the Patriots, the Cowboys and the Packers will all win on Sunday. And if they all win, you win more money than if you had just bet on the three games individually.
But you'd win even more money if you picked the winners of all 14 football games on Sunday. That $10 bet could turn into a lot of money if all your picks are right. But if only 13 of your 14 picks hit right, you get nothing.
Make sense?
Well, some guy put down $3.36 and picked the winners of 10 SummerSlam matches, and he won $45,600.
Yes, he basically cleaned all the change out of his couch and turned it into a fully loaded BMW 4-Series.
Wouldn't you like to do that, too?
Well, too bad. You can't.
Why not, you ask? So many of WWE's PPV matches are so predictable, how hard could it be?
It's not hard at all (especially if you're a WWE insider) and that's precisely the problem.
According to Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer, even before this mystery man paid off his student loans by emptying his piggy bank, "a lot of the gambling sites were considering dropping WWE because insiders that knew could make a lot of money and that level money was ridiculous."
Even more ridiculous, the WON also reported that WWE talent might be betting on the results of these matches. The report is kind of nebulous, so we don't know if, say, Enzo is paying for ringside seats to Floyd vs Conor with the money he made betting that Brock would win the Big Beef 4-Way or if Baron Corbin knew he was going to get beat by John Cena and decided to lessen the pain by winning enough money to treat himself to a new addition to his weird skeleton collection.
Regardless, it looks like this is the beginning of the end of bookmakers taking bets on WWE, which is probably for the best.
It's a slippery slope toward Roman putting his life savings on Cena and refusing to kick out after the first AA.
