London Gambler Wins HUGE on Donald Trump

A happy gambler in the United Kingdom picked up more than $620,000 on Donald Trump’s victory over betting favorite Hillary Clinton. 

According to a report from The Independent, an anonymous London bettor put $250,000 on Trump hours before the election. The wager was just a small part of an estimated $250 million bet on the 2016 U.S. presidential election industrywide in the U.K. About $25 million came through traditional betting channels.

The U.K. is one of the oldest regulated sports betting markets in the world. Betting on the presidential race is illegal in America, which has an illicit sports gambling market of more than $140 billion, only because it's legal in just a handful of states.

Leading U.K. betting sites had Clinton listed at 2/9 and Trump at 10/3 just hours before the results started to come in. Nine out of 10 last-minute bets reportedly were on Trump.

The $250,000 wager was one of the largest of the entire U.S. election season. Leading up to Nov. 8, large Trump bets resulted in bookmakers shortening the odds. American polls gave Clinton as high as a 95 percent chance of winning.

In the biggest backfire of all, Irish bookmaker Paddy Power in October paid out $1 million on what it saw as an inevitable Clinton victory.