5 Craziest Bets of All-Time

Humans enjoy the thrill or rush of placing a bet with something valuable, like money, on the outcome of a game, like the NBA or NFL. But if it’s not the everyday froth of Vegas sports books or standing at the window making a bet on a dog at the track, what else is there to bet on?

Everything! From who can hit the farthest drive on the golf course to who can eat the most grasshoppers in one sitting, placing a wager on any and everything is part of the American way.

So, including sports, what are some of the craziest bets we’ve ever seen? Here are five of the wildest bets of all-time.

Movie Bragging Rights

Star Wars is one of the highest grossing film franchises of all-time. No surprise there right? Well, did you also know that George Lucas lost a pile of money on the movie? He didn’t mistakenly sign over rights to the movie to Satan but Lucas was so disappointed with how his film was going that he lost faith in it.

So he placed a wager with his good friend Steven Spielberg that if Star Wars: A New Hope made more money than Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind that he would fork over 2.5% of the film’s movie profits to Spielberg for the rest of time. Star Wars ended up making more money and Lucas had to give Spielberg, well… you can figure out the rest.

Name Change

How would your parents react if you changed your name without telling them? Probably not well and especially if the name isn’t very becoming. In the case of a gentleman from New Zealand, he found out the hard way that his name was changed. He lost a bet and had his name changed to “Full Metal Havok More Sexy N Intelligent Than Spock And All The Superheroes Combined With Frostnova.”

Try answering the phone using that name or showing your license to a police officer if you were pulled over. That’s why it’s usually not a good idea to bet something that has personal value, like your name.

Bodily Fluids

Sometimes bets can go too far. For shock value or in an attempt to gain back what you’ve lost, you’ll sometimes take it further than you really should. Take a fan of the Houston Texans football team, for instance. As his team was losing, he wagered that he would drink a glass of his own urine if the Texans came back.

Care to guess what happened next?

The Texans came back to win and Mr. “Wager for the purpose of putting on a show for the camera” had to slug a cup of his own bodily fluid.

Plastic Surgery

A professional backgammon player accepted a bet to have fake breasts implanted and to wear them for an entire year. He did so to fulfill the bet but ended up keeping the silicon breasts for nearly 20 years.

Talk about dedication!

Cheeseburger Cash

In what has to be one of the craziest bets that will blow your mind, a poker player once wagered with another poker player that he couldn’t eat a hamburger for $10,000. Sounds like an insane bet on the surface, because after all, who can’t down an entire cheeseburger? A dedicated vegetarian, that’s who. The player making the wager was smart enough to accept knowing that he could break his no-meat rule for a cool $10,000.

From celebrities to friends at a baseball game, losing bets can have interesting consequences. Before you place your next bet, consider these crazy bets and decide if you’re really willing to pony up the wager if you lose.

What are you looking for?