Cliche Corner   

All bets are off , says Uncle Sam
(London's Daily Mail)

All bets are off for online gambling after Congress passed a bill restricting banks and credit card companies from sending payments outside U.S jurisdiction Sept. 30.
(Boston University's Daily Free Press)

All bets are off , if Ontario has its way; Province takes aim at ads for Net gambling
(Toronto's Globe and Mail)

Look for the coming lame duck session to be one large horse-swapping session, more so than usual. The word on Capitol Hill is that heading into the lame duck session, " all bets are off ."
(Oneida, New York's Indian Country Today)

"[I]f the world continues to isolate Kim Jong-Il through the U.N. – right – or through any kind of sanctions, then this is the type of guy who would say, 'You know what? Here, Iran, al Qaeda, whoa, did I just lose that nuclear weapon in your cave?' He won't use a nuke, but he would let somebody else use it, and then all bets are off ."
(CNN's Glenn Beck)

All bets are off in Latin America's biggest country: In the aftermath of Sunday's first-round presidential election, it's no longer outlandish to think that Brazil's left-of- center President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva could lose the Oct. 29 runoff.
(Miami Herald)

"If we go to three to five degrees Fahrenheit warmer, all bets are off ... It will be a dramatically different planet."
(NASA scientist James Hansen on ABC)

– from more than 440 references in a two-month period between the end of August and the end of October