He Lost the Bet and Took an Insane 99-Character Name

Some people lose money on their bets. But not all the bets are about money. A guy from New Zealand lost a part of his identity in a poker bet. According to the bet, he was supposed to go and officially change his name.

His new weird name was “Full Metal Havok More Juicy N Intelligent Than Spock And All The Superheroes Combined With Frostnova.” This name sounds both weird and illegal, but it’s only weird.

According to New Zealand authorities, this name is totally legal because it doesn’t exceed the limit of characters. They say the application was received back in 2010, and the applicant paid all the necessary fees and filled out the required paperwork.

Good news! This man doesn’t have to live all his life under such a long name. He can go and change it back to what he used to have, and the only problem is that he’ll have to pay that fee again. Do not underestimate your rival, ever. One guy lost 10,000 dollars because of this mistake!

Here’s the story: there were two professional poker players, Howard and David, and Howard was a vegetarian. So, David came up with a bet: if Howard eats a hamburger, he gives him 10 grand. Howard ate a 100% beef burger and offered another bet in return. He knew that David couldn’t stand olives, and that’s why the second bet was about eating them. Unlike Howard, David couldn’t eat what he disliked. This way, Howard got 20,000 dollars for... eating. That’s an expensive burger!

A Londoner placed a million-to-one to bet that the end of the world would happen before the end of 2000. Anyway, it’s long after the year 2000. There’s one thing I still don’t get though: if that guy made a bet about the end of the world, which meant everything would have stopped existing, including the betting agency and the guy himself, well, how was he supposed to grab the money he expected to win?

One day, Theodor Geisel, a writer, and Bob Cerf, a publisher, made a bet. The publisher bet 5 dollars that Theodor couldn’t write a book with 50 words or even fewer. Well, Theodor, better known as Dr. Seuss won the bet, and the result of that bet was his book “Green Eggs and Ham”.

If you take a look at the text, you may think that Dr. Seuss cheated, since even though the book is really short, it still has over 700 words. Yeah, it’s longer than 50 words, but he only used 50 words to write it. So, even if someone doesn’t speak English, they only need to learn 50 words to read an actual book in this language!

Dr. Seuss’ previous record was “The Cat in the Hat”, where he only used 236 words. All the words he used for “Green Eggs and Ham” were mostly short and had one syllable only, with the only exception. The word “anywhere” is the longest in the whole book. Ah, and the whole book rhymes!

Once in 2009, the odds were totally in favor of Patricia Demauro who decided to try her luck and play craps. That was her first time playing. It may seem like a simple dice game, but it’s not, there’s a bazillion rules, and Patricia had a friend beside her who explained the policies and procedures. The game started.

Each time she rolled the dice, she bet against the number 7. She did that 154 times in a row, and each time, she did it successfully. Now the funny math part: statistically, 7 is the number that’s most likely to show up when you roll the dice. Here’s why.

The minimum you can have if you throw two dice is 2, and the maximum is 12. There’s only one way to get 2 — if you have 1 on each die. 2 ways to get 3, 3 ways to get 4, and so on. See the logic? Have you guessed already how many ways there are to get 7 on the dice? Right, there are 6 possible combinations. 7 is the peak, and then the trend descends, so there are 5 combinations to get 8 on the dice and only one to get 12.

Thomas Cover, a statistics professor from Stanford, calculated the odds Patricia could successfully bet against 7 154 times in a row were 1 to 56 trillion. That day, she did roll seven by the way, but it took her more than 4 hours. Even so, she’s rumored to have become 7-figures richer that day. Beginner’s luck!

Here’s another crazy bet from the British Isles that turned out to be a birthday present. Fred Craggs from Yorkshire was celebrating his 60th birthday and decided to make a tiny 50-pence bet on the horse race outcome. 50 pence is about 57 cents, and it was a combined outcome bet for 8 horses. The odds were way lower than those of Patricia Demauro, only 2,800,000 to 1, but let’s face it, such a low-odds bet seems impossible to win.

However, Fred won a whopping 1,000,000 pounds, which is over 1.1 million dollars. Yeah, he could treat himself to a bunch of birthday presents! Cool fact here: among the horses he picked for the bet there were 2 with fun names: “Isn’t that lucky” and “A dream come true.” Well, I guess Fred’s dreams came true indeed.

What happens if someone places a bet 20 minutes before the game ends, and they bet on a losing team? This person is most likely to lose the money, but there was an exception. In the UK, an anonymous person bet 100 pounds, which is about 115 US dollars, on the combined results.

All of the teams he bet on were losing, and there was little time left until the end of the matches. I guess a sort of miracle happened because 20 minutes later that person got 650,000 pounds richer. Yeah, all of the 8 teams he bet on somehow won. The odds were 6,500 to 1, so I’m telling you — it was just a miracle.

Back in 1989, there was quite a weird bet made by a Welsh guy. One day, he walked into a local betting agency and made a bet about some random events that, according to him, would happen in the future. He even set a time frame for that bet — the events were supposed to happen before the new millennium, which is before 2000. So, here’s the list of his predictions.

For starters, he believed that the famous rock band U2 would have stayed together. The odds were 3 to 1. Next, he was also sure an Australian television soap opera called “Neighbours” would still be aired on British TV. It started back in 1985, and in 1989 when the bet was made, it had been airing for 4 years already, which is quite a period. The odds were 5 to 1, but the Welsh guy could have even extended the time frame and would still win.

The Neighbours were on TV until recently — the soap opera finished in July 2022 with 38 seasons and almost 9,000 episodes. He made a bet on yet another soap opera called “Home and Away”. Not only was it still aired in the year 2000, but it’s still on TV today. It’s been aired since 1988, and the odds were 8 to 1. Yeah, seems like that guy was into TV shows, and he also included the soap opera Eastenders in his list. Odds were 5 to 1, and guess what, it’s still on TV, since 1985!

The last prediction on his list was about singer Cliff Richards becoming a knight. Indeed, in 1995, he became the first rock star to ever be awarded a knighthood. The reason why he was so honored was his contribution to charity. The total odds of these predictions came to 6,479 to 1. In the year 2000, the Welsh guy won around $253,000 which is rumored to be the largest novelty bet win ever. The coolest part here is that initially, back in 1989, he only paid about $40 to make that bet. That’s a heck of a return for an eleven-year bet!