After just 5 weeks of rolling over, the Scoop6 win pot and climbed to a value of £279,409 on the 1st of October 2016.
It hadn’t exactly grabbed the imagination of the British betting public though, with just 63,519 units in the competition when the first race began at Newmarket.
Not many of them were left after 9/2 shot Summer Chorus took the win though, with those 63,519 tickets reduced to 10,339 – so a mere 16% of units made it past the first race.
In race 2, punters eschewed the favourite, Muffri’ha, in favour of other runners. In fact, six other horses were more fancied by Scoop6 bettors than Muffri’ha. So when the favourite crossed the line first, the hammering of the punters continued, with just 1,449 surviving the cull.
With under 1,500 units left and 4 races still to run, many had already written off this weeks Scoop6 as a bust, but somehow, 136 tickets managed to get through race 3, which was a 20 horse race.
Wick Powell claimed the win at 12/1, and the pool of tickets remaining was whittled down by another 90%+. Only halfway through the day and a mere handful of punters still in with a chance of winning the pot.
A 6/1 shot named Sharja Queen won race 4, reducing the numbers to just 19, and with an 18 strong field in race 5, it seemed inconceivable that the pot would be won.
Once again, punters turned their noses up at the favourite, only for the favourite to go on and win the race. Just 2 units had backed Librisa Breeze, who ultimately performed as expected and won the race, with a horse called Growl attracting more backers. This was the second time bettors could have been saved by the favourite but went elsewhere, to their own detriment.
So there was a glimmer of hope in the final race, in which 10 horses would run. One punter backed the unnamed favourite, which turned out to be a horse called Sole Power who came 5th; the other backed Easy Road who was at 9/2.
Unbelievably, with just a 1 in 10 chance of success, that second punter had backed the winner. It had been anything but an Easy Road, but the £279,409 win pot was theirs.
What’s more, they would go on to add a further £80,677 to that by winning the bonus fund the Saturday after, for a grand total of £360,086.