• Compulsive Gambling Stories
• Gambling Stories Of Big Losses
• Worst Gambling Stories
• Gambling Stories Podcast
• Gambling Stories 2018

Gambling Articles By: Harper Whitefield. The gambler who lost $127 million. In 2007 the gambler Terrance Watanabe lost $127 million in a one-year gambling streak. Even for the city of sin Las Vegas itself this is absurd. Don’s sports gambling addiction— personal stories about a broken marriage and tainted childhood memories January 3, 1983, will forever be ingrained in Dianne’s mind as the night her husband, Don, started their family down a long and winding path of deceit, disappointment, and disaster. Editor’s Note: We are grateful to Ms. Jodie Nealley for sharing her story with readers of The BASIS. Throughout, we have provided links to journal articles and other sources to illustrate how aspects of Jodie’s story coincide with scientific findings.This Editorial is part of our month-long Special Series on Gambling Disorder. To understand my story you need to understand my addictions. The Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told is the colorful story of a spectacular three-year-old female racehorse in the male dominated world of thoroughbred racing. The book is a dramatic narrative of an exciting and frightening time in my life. In response, we received some of the most bizarre, funny and craziest gambling stories, ever! We selected the best ones for you to enjoy. You won’t believe some of the real-life experiences our readers from all over the world have had.

A spin on the roulette wheel, 80 hours passing chips at the poker table, an incredible streak of luck at the races. Most of us know a funny, straight up crazy gambling story. Similar to a ‘rite of passage’ or ‘coming of age’, gamblers, and their friends, love to compare each other’s triumphs and even pitfalls. Here are our top 5 picks for funniest gambling stories.

Grandma Rolls, and Wins, 154 Times

The odds for this first story are 1 in 1.56 TRILLION. Grandmother Patricia Demauro walked to a craps table at Atlantic City's Borgata Hotel Casino and Spa with $100. She had only played craps one other time, but tired of the slots she had previously played, she picked up the orange dice and started off with a lucky “roll”, no pun intended. Four hours and 18 minutes later, Demauro had not only won all 154 rolls, but had also broken a world record for the longest craps roll and the most successive dice rolls without 'sevening out.' She never stated how much she won, but experts suggest it was likely to be in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. Now that is luck.

A Lucky Win and then Deportation

You hear about gamblers undergoing serious despair and defeat after they’ve cashed in their winnings. But for a woman in Arizona, she had her moment of despair soon after she won the $1200 jackpot at a local casino. After heading to the cash booth to eagerly collect her winnings, she was asked to show her passport. Her failure to do so led to further questioning and the realization that she was illegally in the United States. Not only did she not get to collect her winnings, but she was deported back to Mexico. The key thing to take away here is have your legal I.D. ready to avoid problematic situations.

Compulsive Gambling Stories

300,000 FedEx Employees (and Counting) Owe Their Jobs to Gambling

Gambling Stories Of Big Losses

FedEx currently employs 300,000 people worldwide. The transportation company has a $33 billion dollar capital gain, with its founder and CEO Fred Smith having a personal net worth of $2.1 billion. Had it not been for a Blackjack table, the billion-dollar company may not have ever existed. In 1973, the company had $5,000 in the bank and a $24,000 fuel bill. Thinking they would have to liquidate, Fred Smith decided to take his last bit of money and head to Vegas. There, he turned the $5,000 into $27,000 at a Blackjack table. It was that night which put a man on the path to one of the wealthiest people in the world.

Worst Gambling Stories

The 20-Second Win

Ashley Revell, an English gent, went for an all or nothing roulette spin. After emptying his savings account and selling every single thing he owned, Ashley had a whopping $136,000. He let the wheel work its magic and 20 seconds later, he turned his cash into $272,000. Not bad, but we don’t recommend spending every penny you own in one game.

Gambling Stories Podcast

Cheaters or Not?

In 2000, gamblers Michael Russo and James Grosjean were uncomfortably detained at a well-known casino. They’re suspected crime? Cheating. They’re names were etched into the Griffins’ Book, a database of undesirables. The casino considered this just another day at the office, but Russo and Grosjean sued. They claimed that they had not been found with any cheating devices, they didn’t steal chips and they didn’t cause uproar. They used their minds and their “style of play” to beat the casino, aka counting cards. They argued that the casino and Griffin Investigations illegally detained them and blacklisted them. The verdict? These two gamblers won the suit.

Citing the large financial awards, Griffin Investigations filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2005. Moreover, the casino and other strip casinos have changed their policies about counting cards. And, no, casinos are net letting players count cards; they just can’t take you into the backroom for an impromptu shakedown. Lesson here, lawsuits can indeed change behavior of not only people, but casinos too!

Fact or Fiction?

Our last funny gambling story is one which has not been officially confirmed, but it’s so good that we’ll include is as a bonus. In 2010, news about an 8-year-old boy from Chandigrah, India winning $500,000 spread like a wildfire on the internet. The story goes that this boy, dubbed a computer genius in the sense that he was building web pages at age 4, was using his uncle’s poker account when he hit the jackpot. Sources say the poker room refused to pay out because of the boy’s age, but the family insists that the website did indeed know the age of the boy and that they called him the “little poker wizard”. They claim he also won, and collected smaller amounts of money on the site and was paid via PayPal. Since, the anonymous poker site blocked his account. The family of the boy took the poker site to a New Delhi court. As of now, the outcome has not been released. If the story is true, this boy definitely has a solid future in online poker.

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Gambling Stories 2018

• My life is full of gambling stories. Some are funny, some are sad, some other almost tragic. I enjoyed and was fascinated by many of your stories here and decided to share some of mine in a series of short stories. Here’s the first one:

  My gambling addiction goes back a couple of decades. I was 16 when I started playing slots (nobody bothered to check my age back then) and as soon as I turned 18 I started visiting casinos, playing roulette at first and then, later, black jack. I was completely addicted by my early twenties. Addicted to the point where I was late on my rent and had literally nothing to eat on many occasions. It was horrible and I sometimes resorted to actions that I never though I was capable of. Actions that I was often ashamed of. At one such occasion my rent was overdue and I asked a friend for a loan. There was no one else I could ask for help. I emigrated when I was 20 and was all on my own in a foreign country, with a bad, bad gambling addiction. He agreed to loan me money for my rent, but knowing of my gambling habit, he warned me not to gamble, but to pay my landlord immediately. I didn’t appreciate him telling me something that obvious. Of course I wasn’t going to gamble with that money! Why does he have to rub it in, I thought to myself. What an *******! Of course I was going to pay the rent. What was he thinking? That I would gamble away my rent money now that my rent is overdue? He just wants to rub it in, that’s all. Not the friendliest thing to do, but I have only myself to blame. Anyway, I was going to pay the landlord. Had somebody asked me what I thought the odds were of me stopping at the casino on my way home and losing all that money, I would have said less than 1 in 1000. And I really wasn’t gonna stop at the casino. No way was I going to do that. I knew I had to pay the rent and I knew that if didn’t the chances were I would end up on the street. Homeless. No, I wasn’t going to take that chance; I was going to go straight to the landlord and pay my rent.
  But then I realized something. My buddy loaned me 375 fl. (guilders, Dutch currency before introduction of the Euro) and my rent was only 360. He didn’t have change, so he gave me 3 hundred fl. bills, 1 fifty fl. bill and 1 twenty-five fl. bill.
  That extra 15 fl. opened a myriad of options for me, endless possibilities. Not only did I now have money to pay my rent, I also had 15 fl. above and beyond that. 15 fl. that I was going to parlay into something meaningful. I was loving life. Not only was I not getting evicted, but with some luck I was going to have 50 or maybe even 100 fl extra and treat myself to something nice. Something I was long due, something that I deserved. Maybe a steak, french fries and some snacks for later. I had been eating crap for months. Blood rushed to my head. I was excited, ecstatic even, thinking of what I could do with 50 fl. And parlaying 15 to 50, although not likely, is possible. 1 in 3 odds. I can do it. I was due a break.
  And if I lose the 15 fl? Too bad, but I didn’t count on that money anyway. I knew there was no way was I going to lose more than 15. Worse comes to worse I’ll lose the 15, go home and pay the rent.
  After some consideration I decided to play a single hand of Black Jack first. I liked Black Jack and had just learned the basic strategy. I bet 10 fl. and was dealt 11 against the dealer’s 7. For those of you not familiar with Black Jack, having 11 against the dealer’s 7 is a fairly big advantage. I was tempted to double down. Double down I did, adding another 10 fl. and I lost. Now I only had 355 fl left, meaning I was 5 fl short on my rent. Not the end of the world, I knew, the landlord would understand it and wait a couple of days for 5 fl. But, instead, I decided to chase the 5 fl. with 350 fl.
  Short story shorter, I lost it ALL.
  That was probably the worst night of my life. I knew I was going to get evicted. I walked home, a long, cold walk through rainy weather. I was happy it was cold and I was wishing it would rain harder. I wanted to be punished. I arrived home and I didn’t know what to do. I lied on my bed. I thought about my options and quickly realized I had none. I was so poor, I had no valuable belongings that I could sell, I couldn’t ask my friend for more money because he wouldn’t give it to me, I knew the landlord wouldn’t be too sympathetic and I had gotten fired from the restaurant I was working at, a week earlier.
  The near future looked grim. I was lying in my bed motionless, inspecting my surrounding. I was tired, but I was afraid to fall asleep. I was afraid to fall asleep for I knew it would be a night full of nightmares. I had been there before. But it was never this bad. I looked around me in desperation. My shabby belongings, my worn-out shoes, a few books, my walkman, a couple of t-shirts and underwear that I hung to dry. One object caught my attention though. A roll-on deodorant.
  Then, I don’t know how or why, an idea formed in my head. I don’t know where it came from or what led to it, but I suddenly found myself grabbing the deodorant (it was made of glass) and started banging my face. I hit myself hard, inspecting for bruises after every blow. No bruises appeared at first and I kept on banging my head with the deodorant bottle relentlessly. It hurt, but I deserved it. And besides, I wasn’t doing it to hurt or punish myself. I was doing it as a way out. A shameful and disgraceful way out, I knew; but still better than the alternative of becoming homeless.
  I stopped hitting myself after a few minutes and waited. My face turned first pink then blue. I overdid it. My entire face was swollen and looked terrible.
  I went to bed and fell asleep. I slept like a baby for I knew my problems would go away. At least for the time being they would.
  In the morning I saw the landlord and told him what happened. I was mugged by two guys in the park. And they robbed me. They robbed me of the rent money I was going to give him that day. He was very sympathetic and said he’d wait till I’m in a position to pay him. Told the same story to my friend and he loaned me another 375 fl a couple of days later. This time I made it home.
  It wasn’t until 20 years later that I told my friend what really happened that night. He and I have been through thick and thin together and he is the closes friend I have. Even so, I felt really uncomfortable coming clean about it. If you dine with the devil, bring a long spoon

  Boy to I feel that pain. Been there.. literally.. Thanks for posting. It reminded me of that horrible feeling in the pit of your stomach when you are desperate and know you have no way out and no one to blame but yourself. That horrible feeling of self loathing and desperation where ideas you never thought were possible pop into your head. I never want that feeling again. It cost me too much.
  Thanks again.
  I will make this work!