Gambling Horror Stories Of The Rich And Famous
Gambling is something that we do with our disposable income. The overwhelming majority of players who indulge in the hobby do so for fun, and have a healthy relationship with the hobby. We all know that we're as likely to win as we are to lose, and we're fine with that. If we're particularly skilled at card games, we might be able to improve our chances of walking away with a positive result, but that's the best we can hope for.
If you're not a cards player, then you're limited to playing games of chance. In a casino, that means roulette or slots. Almost all of us have played online or online slots at some point in the past few years, and we know the pain of loss as well as we know the joy of victory. The losses are worth it for those moments of victory though; a good mobile slots win can make a difference to your 'fun budget' for the rest of the month. A really great mobile slots win might just help you buy something you've been putting money aside for for a long time. Most of the time, though, you have to bet big to win big.
Most of us will never have the capacity to bet as big as rich and famous celebrities do, though. They earn a lot more than us, and so they have a lot more disposable income than we do. That means they can afford to lose a lot more in a casino, and some of them have done it in style. Although we’re sure that all five people we’re about to talk about had great nights inside a casino, these are the stories they’d rather we didn’t know!
Jimmy White Loses $4m
Although possibly more familiar to our British readers than our American audience, Jimmy White is a name that should be familiar to anyone who follows snooker. He’s widely regarded as the greatest player never to win the world championship. He won enough money at smaller tournaments to live a rock and roll lifestyle, though, and at one point liked nothing better than weekend-long parties with notorious gangsters. Inevitably, he also enjoyed visiting casinos with his prize money. According to his autobiography, White estimates that he’s lost a small fortune to gambling over the years, including a $250,000 bet he placed on himself to win the world championship during the late 1990s. He came second. In an attempt to recoup his losses, White headed straight to a casino where he claims to have lost $4m on roulette in less than six hours.
Robert Maxwell Spins Away $2.25m
Rupert Murdoch may seem like he owns half of the world's media these days, but he didn't always have such a monopoly. During the 1980s, he had a rival in the shape of Britain's Robert Maxwell, who owned several newspapers and television stations. Maxwell was a multi-billionaire during a time when becoming a billionaire was harder to achieve than it is now, and so betting millions of dollars at a time was equivalent to any regular person spending $10 or $20. That's probably why he didn't seem to care when he lost $2.25m playing three different roulette wheels at the same time in London's Les Ambassadeurs Casino in the late 1980s, all of which spun simultaneously. That meant he effectively lost the money in under two minutes. There might be a different reason he didn't care about the loss, though. It later transpired that he'd profited extensively from pension fraud, and so the money he was staking his bets with was probably stolen anyway.
Archie Karas Cheats And Fails
The big question about Archie Karas isn't how he succeeded at poker - it's how he started losing. For a brief period in the 1990s, he was the most successful poker player in the world. Everyone involved in gambling knew his story - he started with a single $50 game in 1992, and by 1995 he'd made $40m. Allegedly, he didn't lose one game in that entire time. He should have known when he was onto a good thing and walked away, but he astonishingly went on to blow that whole amount - plus $20m more - on craps and baccarat in the space of just three weeks. His name surfaced again in 2013 when he was arrested at a blackjack table in Las Vegas, where he'd been caught marking cards. When the police raided his home, they found thousands of hollowed-out chips from a variety of notable casinos. It seems likely he was never really that good at cards to begin with - he was just a convincing cheat.
Charles Barkley’s Bad Blackjack Bet
Charles Barkley is an all-time-great basketball player and an all-time-awful gambler. He still enjoys a high-profile media career in connection with the sport that made him famous, and he probably needs the money to support himself. It seems that everything he made as a player was spent in casinos. Barkley has always said that he's never believed he had a gambling problem, but the statistics suggest otherwise. His record loss was $2.5m on just one game of blackjack, although he's never confirmed when or where this happened. It might not be an exaggeration - a former Houston Rockets teammate claims to have once seen Barkley spend $60,000 on a single spin of a roulette wheel. In total, Barkley estimates he's lost somewhere in the region of $10m gambling over the course of his life.
Charlie Sheen Can’t Pick Sports
As you may or may not know, sports betting has only recently become legal in most of the United States of America. We don't know where Charlie Sheen was doing his sports betting in the time before legalization, but if his ex-wife Denise Richards' statements in their divorce papers are accurate, it was definitely happening. Sheen liked to do everything to excess in the early 21st century, and gambling can be added to his list of vices. Richards says that Sheen was spending $200,000 per week betting on sports for three entire months and never won a single bet. Losing every time seems unlikely unless his predictions were totally wayward, but if we take her at face value, that means he went through a cool $2.4m during that time. She had many good reasons to divorce him, but that one has to be up there.
So there you have it. Being rich and famous doesn’t make you exempt from the standard rules of gambling. What can we take from the stories? Probably two things; firstly that rich people sometimes make really dumb decisions, and secondly that we should never bet what we can’t afford to lose!
