How to win a million - TWICE!

LOTTERIES in most countries of the world are just that. Lightning would strike you more than twice before you won one. Some maths professor with time on his hands (and on his mind) calculated that, such are the odds against winning the English lottery, that the same six numbers chosen (from 49) every week would not guarantee the jackpot unless you faithfully submitted them for about 7,000 years.

A popular-science story cooked up for the Millennium (capital "M", of course) in one English tabloid, raving about gene technology, had the heavenly headline: "Immortality is just around the corner." You obviously need it to win the English lottery.

A consumer book called The Which Guide to Gambling points out that the odds are much better to win money from a study of horseracing. But can you win a million on the horses? The answer is emphatically "yes." The English racing year started with two easy lessons in gambling: how to win a million, and how to give away a million. It was all done by the same syndicate, dubbed by the British Press "the Munchen Glad Backers."

The seven men in the Munich team had the only winning ticket in the English Tote's Scoop6 bet, landing a jackpot of £917,021 for naming the winners of six (Channel-4) televised Saturday races. How did they do it? Well, at £2 per bet, they covered a permutation totalling 2,160 combinations by getting Munich bookmaker Simon Springer to "bankroll" them for part of the £4,320 investment so that they could include all the runners in the last race. Cheating? No. Simple? Hardly, since they had to find the winners of the first five races with just two or three selections in each race. In fact, they had a banker, the top novice-hurdler, Monsignor; otherwise the "perm" would have been too many thousands, even for a bookie! Had the single nomination for one race lost, then the whole concoction would have gurgled down the plughole, with no champagne at the end of the day. But Monsignor won.

With one or two other obvious contenders in the other races, the pot looked "winnable" (I'm quoting syndicate leader David Connolly-Smith, an Englishman abroad), but only if you found the cash to include all your selections "with the field" in the impossible-to-pick-from last race. The method was not new, of course, but syndicate betting was new on a young Scoop6 which had not previously reached the heights that made permutation investment worthwhile. The Munchen Glad Backers had no secret formula. In fact, having won a million (OK, nearly), they then gave one away (yes, really)! Part of the unit stake on the Tote's new bet is placed in a pool which serves as a bonus.

As if a Pick Six is not difficult enough, all successful Scoop6ers have the chance the following Saturday to win the bonus pool which, when the Munich Seven struck, stood at over £1million. This time, we are talking about a million: £1,084,422, in fact. The snag? They had to pick one horse in the Tote's selected race. And the Tote picked the hardest race of the day, possibly one of the hardest of the jumping season, called the Warwick National Chase, a long-distance test of stayers in the mud on a track otherwise rarely used for anything else of this calibre. Not much form to go on, and winners in the previous eight seasons had included those at odds of 9-1, 12-1 and 16-1, with not a single favourite successful. So they faced a hopeless task.

Not so, said turf advisors MajorData. The Munchen Glad Backers could not lose! MajorData explained: "The sure way to win on the horses is to have the favourite running for you free, or know that it cannot win. Then you can back everything else in the race, and you don't care which one wins. "All the syndicate has to do is to pick the favourite in the named race, Kingdom Of Shades, for the Scoop6 bonus. Then they can use some of the original jackpot winnings to back everything else in the race! "At 3-1 on the Morning Line (early betting), Kingdom of Shades takes out 25% of the book. If you can ignore him, which they can if he's their bonus pick, then this leaves the book underround. Back all the others, and you must win. "In other words, providing they cover every eventuality, they can't lose. If Kingdom Of Shades wins, they scoop the bonus; if he loses, inevitably one of their other bets wins." In fact, Kingdom of Shades was 2-1 at starting price, a take-out of 33% and more, with the odds of the rest of the market totalling 80%. Even better. But the Munchen Give-It Backers went for a do-or-die Pick One! They nominated Slideofhill for their bonus. A querky customer at the best of times, and - with a million riding on him - he sulked round and finished tailed off. He could not have won sliding down a hill. Just for the record, a nag called Choisty scored at 20-1.

Rule number-one for syndicates: get yourselves organised, so that you can cover your back. It's no good having one bookie on your side. You need them all. Particularly when they don't know it. Meanwhile, the Scoop6 marches on: as a small-stakes bet for individual punters, it's as big a lottery as... well, the lottery. But its attraction is no less since, with two pools, it is often going to have a roll-over building up big potential winnings in one of them.

The English Tote has also introduced the Exacta, a straight-forecast bet to replace it's either-order Dual Forecast. The take-out of 24% is lower than some English Tote pools but still high in comparison with Australia. Here's a tip: because of the way the English bookmakers' computer forecast (CSF) is worked out, the return is poor when an odds-on shot is second. The Tote Exacta beats it by a wide margin in this situation.