If you thought that Mike White bet paid out big, conference championship weekend paid out more than quadruple that on a free wager

Remember when Mike White was the darling of the NFL? I know, Halloween feels like it was three years ago instead of three months, but that is when White threw for the most passing yards in the NFL that week in leading the New York Jets to a 34-31 victory against the current AFC Champion Cincinnati Bengals. That’s right, there’s a team playing in the Super Bowl that lost to the Jets. White threw for 405 yards and three touchdowns in that game.

Once Week 7 concluded, White’s 405 yards won a bettor in New Jersey $125,000. The man put down $1,000 at an Atlantic City casino on White to have the most passing yards in the NFL that week. That’s quite a profit, but it’s pocket change compared to what bettor cashed in on FanDuel this weekend.

Noted civil rights memorabilia collector Darren Rovell reported that someone used a $20 site credit on the sportsbook, and took 29,000 to 1 odds on a correct score parlay for conference championship weekend. The Bengals defeated the Kansas City Chiefs 27-24 and the Los Angeles Rams knocked off the San Francisco 49ers 20-17. Hitting on this parlay, a bet that cost a person only the time it took to make it, paid out $579,020. And they say there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Nearly $600,000 on a free trial. Normally, a free trial would cost a person $20 per month until the person remembers to cancel the subscription or loses a debit card. The person who won that money would be wise to delete the FanDuel app and anything else from their devices and lives that has anything to do with gambling — and that includes investing 10 percent of this in crypto which will have a person check stock prices like a scoreboard. It’s never going to get better than this. Retire on top like Jim Brown and put $300,000 of that in the safest investment possible. Anything else is just giving the money back to the house.

Yes, I’m advocating for being boring with the score of a lifetime which is why I would be a terrible character in a bank robbery movie. We take home $50,000 once and I’m already looking at IRAs.

For all of the bad beats that Scott Van Pelt and Stanford Steve take viewers through on a weekly basis, to that coworker whose every other story is about a bath they took on a college football parlay or an over/under on a Toronto Raptors game in December, a story like this is the reason for those of us that haven’t hit that big score yet gamble.

It could be you. It could be your 90s sitcom hot streak at the craps table, or you could be the underdog that gets to the final table at the World Series of Poker. It could be your seven-game parlay that buys you a new car, or the digits from your siblings’ birthdays that you put on a Mega Millions ticket that vaults you into one of Jeff Bezos’ neighborhoods.

That’s the thrill of it. The rush. The potential of you putting a small amount of effort into something that has a payout. It’s what keeps you buying scratch offs when you get gas and makes you want to hurl your television out the window when all of your Final Four teams lose the first weekend of the tournament.

For the person who took in that haul off of a free $20, salute to you. You truly are an American hero. A person who literally got something for nothing. Now excuse me while I continue my research on NFTs.