Better to be lucky than good! How a stroke of fortune banked a golf punter $17,500 from $20 bet

An each-way bet on DP World Tour and PGA Tour winners saw one lucky gambler celebrating almost as hard as the tournament champions.

When Sepp Straka holed his winning putt at the PGA Tour’s Truist Championship on Sunday, there was a huge cheer… but not just at Philadelphia Cricket Club. While Straka’s fourth PGA Tour win banked him $3.6m and, almost certainly, his second Ryder Cup appearance for Team Europe, it also ensured one lucky gambler had the night of his life.

The punter needed the Austrian to win to complete an unlikely double because he’d also backed Martin Couvra to win the DP World Tour’s Turkish Airlines Open earlier in the day. The French star, who’d never won a DP World Tour title, shot a closing seven-under 64 at Regnum Carya to win his maiden title by two shots from Jorge Campillo and Haotong Li. Straka won by the same margin over Justin Thomas and Shane Lowry.

Those results banked the bettor a cool £13,270 ($17,618) – pocket change compared to the amounts Jon Daly or Phil Mickelson have won from their golf gambles down the years, but potentially life-changing for us normal folk. At the very least, it’s enough to buy some shiny new golf equipment and take a nice golf break to play some bucket list courses (while ensuring they’ve got enough golf balls to get through the rounds while there).

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However, it could all have been very different. The original £15 ($20) bet, placed with Paddy Power, had been a treble, with the customer backing Straka at 35/1 in the Truist Championship, Couvra at 45/1 in the Turkish Open, and Pierceson Coody in the Myrtle Beach Championship, which ran alongside the Truist on the PGA Tour.

Coody was a late withdrawal, meaning the bet was automatically changed to a £5 ($6.64) each-way double with £2.50 ($3.32) each-way singles on Straka and Couvra. Of course, had Coody played, he could well have made it an even more incredible win, but with zero PGA Tour wins to the world No.173’s name and no victories on any tour since July 2023, it feels unlikely. New Zealand’s Ryan Fox went on to win the title.

As lucky betting breaks go, it’s a good one, but nowhere near as good as a 60-year-old man from Belfast enjoyed in 2012 when he inadvertently won £140,000 ($186,000). He’d intended to back Gonzalo Fernandez-Castano to win the Qatar Masters and Kyle Stanley to win the Waste Management Phoenix Open. Stanley did his part, but, with Paul Lawrie winning in Qatar, the Northern Irish gambler’s luck looked like it was out… until he realized he’d accidentally selected Fernandez-Castano to lead after the first round (which he did), as opposed to win the event. That meant his £50 each-way double was a winner and he was in the money.

Paddy Power haven’t released details of last week’s winner, but we’d love to give him a call and find out who he’s backing for this week’s PGA Championship. In the meantime, we’ll stick with our betting expert, Tom Jacobs.

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The latest lucky gambler wasn’t the only one who struck gold with the Truist Championship result. Straka’s regular caddie Duane Bock was forced to miss the event (and this week’s PGA Championship) with a back injury, meaning the 32-year-old turned to Drew Mathers, who plays on the mini tours in America and knows Straka from his home club in Birmingham, Alabama.

While Straka hasn’t revealed how big a cut he gave Mathers from his whopping paycheck, if it’s anywhere near the standard 10% then the budding pro should have pocketed more than enough to ensure he can keep chasing his dreams.