Given that date from the Kepler Space Observatory has been used to suggest that there may be as many as two billion planets in our galaxy alone that are capable of supporting life, you’d have to be particularly full of yourself to believe that we’re alone in the universe. Perhaps nearly as popular as bets on Elvis are wagers based around the idea of alien life being proven to exist. Here are some of the top ones you’ll be able to find: When Will Alien Life Be Proven? He walked away with £194,400, so you might well be reading this and fancy a few novelty bets of your own. When the Millennium Bug made no real difference to anyone’s life and all of those bets came true, a full eleven years after he placed them, you can imagine the man’s delight in being able to cash in on his £30 bet placed at odds of 6,479/1. He believed that Cliff Richard would be knighted before the year 2000, that U2 would remain together and continue making music past the turn of the millennium and that both EastEnders and the Australian soap Neighbours would also keep making shows past that point.

In 1989 a man placed an accumulator of novelty bets. I was thinking about that recently and wondered, what other mad bets have there been over the years? What mad bets can you place now? Weirdest Things You Can Bet On Right Now He would only have been a teenager at the time, but such was the confidence his dad had in him at the time that he put a £100 bet on him achieving his goal at odds of 100/1. Perhaps it’s because I’m a Liverpool supporter and the goalkeeper played for my team for a while, but for whatever reason I remember it being in the news that Kirkland’s dad, Eddie Kirkland, had put on a bet in 1994 that his son would win an England cap before he turned thirty. Personally I always remember the story from 2006 when Chris Kirkland made his England debut and his dad and some friends netted around £10,000 as a result. That’s why new features such as #RequestABet have been launched by companies like Sky Bet. The fact that unlikely events occurring will win us a lot of money combines well with the fact that the majority of bookmakers will offer you odds on almost anything, should you ask them. Never is that more so than when we bet on things that are unlikely to happen, which is why multi-fold accumulators appeal so much. Obviously one of the main ones is that it’s a chance to win ourselves some money, normally seeing a decent-sized return for a relatively small stake. There are so many reasons why most of us love to have a flutter.

Craziest gambling bets