Many a punter has dreamed of winning £1 million from a £1 bet, but when Coral introduced their new Football Jackpot at the beginning of the 2013-14 football season, that dream became a reality.
Coral put up the £1m cash prize for the first person to correctly predict the outcome (home win, draw or away win) of the 15 matches on their weekly Football Jackpot coupon. The prize was scooped after a couple of months, but even after that Coral have guaranteed a weekly prize of at least £100,000 to the winner (thought the prize is shared if more than one person gets all the results spot on), and if no one wins in a particular week it rolls over to the next. As such there has since been another couple of £1m jackpots, making some lucky punters very happy indeed!
As mentioned, players of the Football Jackpot must simply select the result they think will occur in each of the 15 matches on the weekly coupon. In order to increase your chances you can opt to select a up to three outcomes for a given match (home win, draw and/or away win) which will increase the number of “lines” you have, each line costing you your unit stake. Players can choose to stake between £1 and £20 per line, and if you simply can’t decide whether Man United will lose or draw at Everton or Crystal Palace will get the home win against Stoke, you can choose the “Lucky Dip” option and your coupon will be picked for you as if by magic!
Like the old football pools, the more people who enter, the bigger the prize available to the winners, and as well as the weekly jackpot of at least £100,000, there are consolation prizes for those who miss out by one or two results, and while these will be substantially less than the big prize, they can at least soften the blow of missing out.
When it comes to strategy, the best thing you can do is to research the matches picked for that week’s coupon. You have until 3pm each Saturday to enter, so there is plenty of time to check the form, head to head record and other statistics that could give you an insight into the likely result.
Of course, if predicting football matches was as easy as checking a few stats we’d all have retired years ago, and the fact that there are often surprising results is one of the sport’s great appeals. So another way to improve you chances of hitting that life-changing jackpot is to add an extra line or two for the matches that are particularly tough to predict. For instance if you are certain a team won’t lose a match but you can’t decide whether they will get the win or settle for a draw, you can select both options, and though it will cost you an extra quid or two as long as you only do it for a couple of matches, if it makes the difference in terms of you winning a few grand or a cool million, it could be money well spent!
It is also worth noting that when the jackpot hasn’t been won for a couple of weeks the jackpot fund rolls over, giving you better value prizes for your stakes. Sometimes you may seem to have an even better chance of winning if one or more of the matches on the coupon ends up being postponed, meaning you may only need to predict 14, 13 or even fewer games to win. But Coral have said that in such instances the top prize will not be the full jackpot, so don’t get too excited if it happens.
All in all, if you fancy having a go at a fun football bet that gives you the chance to win the kind of cash you could usually only dream about, the Coral Football Jackpot could be just the ticket.