Crazy Bets

Some ultra-conservative people think that all betting is crazy. This article isn't about those party poopers. Instead, we're going to look at some of the biggest and craziest bets made or offered in the gambling industry. These are the kind of wagers that prove that some people really will bet on anything.

When it comes to the people that offer the craziest bets, William Hill takes the crazy cake. The UK sportsbook has offered odds on all kinds of events from the discovery of the Loch Ness Monster to the end of the world (good luck collecting on that one). They even offer personal accumulating bets on your odds of going broke, getting famous, or dying within a set amount of time.

At the other end of the spectrum are the people that are making crazy bets. Oddly enough, some of the world's most infamous bettors are otherwise successful gamblers. For example, a number of poker's most eccentric pros have been known to make and take crazy proposition bets. Two pros, Gavin Smith and Joe Sebok, even had their own Prop Bets show.

Some poker prop bets could be called crazy because they offer big money to do little things, like when David Grey paid vegetarian Howard Lederer $10k to eat a cheeseburger. Other bets could be called crazy because they border on life-threatening, like when Ted Forrest ran a 26-mile marathon on a 115-degree day (his shoes melted to his feet!). And some bets are just so obviously crazy that you have to question the sanity of everyone involved. For example, in 2008 online pro Jay Kwik took a prop bet that he couldn't live in the Bellagio casino's bathroom for 30 days. Kwik's opponents even offered a reward to anyone that caught him breaking the terms of the bet. Ultimately Kwik won the challenge and emerged from his bathroom abode $40k richer.