A Los Angeles County woman won more than $50,000 on a complicated parlay bet involving five MLB games and several specific scenarios.
The bet was made by a 50-year-old woman in Llano, a small community located about 30 miles southeast of Lancaster in the Antelope Valley.
The unidentified woman made a $1,000 bet through BetUS.com, an online sportsbook that, according to its website, is licensed in Curacao.
The Llano woman made a 7-team parlay bet on Monday through the online sportsbook. A parlay is a series of unrelated bets combined into one, meaning all conditions will need to be satisfied or the bet is a failure. Parlays are complicated and the odds of hitting all conditions are relatively low, meaning the payout tends to be much larger than a standard bet.
According to BetUS, she wagered that the St. Louis Cardinals would defeat the Milwaukee Brewers; the Arizona Diamondbacks would best the Oakland Athletics; the San Diego Padres would defeat the Kansas City Royals; and the Los Angeles Dodgers would beat the Minnesota Twins.
But that’s not all, included in the parlay was the requirement that the Cardinals and Brewers would combine for more than eight runs (they scored 19), the Rangers and Braves would combine for more than nine runs (they combined for 12), and the Dodgers and Twins would score more than 8.5 runs (both teams combined for 17 scores).
“The odds of all of those hitting in a single parlay was a little under two percent,” said Tim Williams, director of public relations for BetUS.
That minute chance of success led to the woman receiving a payout of $53,769.17 — not a bad return on investment.
As for the legality of how the woman managed to place the bet in a state where sports gambling is prohibited? Well, it’s a bit of a gray area, and probably explains why she hasn’t voluntarily identified herself.