27 May
If you’ve read Celina Lin’s recent admission that she tends to “wear lower cut tops the deeper I go in tournaments,” you would be forgiven for thinking that breasts in poker is an exclusively female trait. Not so, as you’re about to see (well, read anyway!).
Back in 1996, magician Brian “The Wiz” Zembic accepted a wager of $100,000 that he wouldn’t get a fine pair of 38C breast implants. As he explains:
I was in some restaurant in Europe and I was with two friends, and his girlfriend at the time was flaunting her boobs. I said to my friend: ‘if I had boobs like hers I can get just as much attention as she would. Then he came up with $100k and I shook his hand and that was it, it was a bet.”
And never one to shirk a dare or a bet, Zembic the magician went ahead with the operation and became the owner of a magnificent pair of tits.
I knew a plastic surgeon who was also a gambler in New York,” he explained, “so I went to his office and I said: ‘can you put boobs in for me?’ and all he said was: ‘this is for a bet, right?’ and I said ‘yeah’ and he said: ‘okay, tell you what, how you gonna pay?’ I said: ‘how about a little bit of backgammon? I played backgammon with him for an hour, I won $5000. Boom. Surgery was free and I woke up with boobs!”
The only catch was that he had to keep the glorious pair for at least one year to win the $100K prop bet. Almost 20 years on and Zembic still proudly displays his ‘chest-ware’.
“I got lazy, I was busy gambling, and, honestly, they grew on me,” stated Zembic in an interview with Maxim magazine shortly afterwards.
Though Brian’s friend described the breast implants as ‘the best $100,000 he’s ever lost’, Zembic recently appeared on Botched, a show centred around plastic surgery disasters on American channel E!
This wasn’t the first outrageous prop bet Zembic had taken on. He once slept with homeless people under New York’s 59th Street Bridge, which earned him $5000. The catch – and you know there always has to be one in prop bets – is that he had to do so with $10,000 of his own cash strapped to his leg.
As for the breasts, well they certainly don’t seem to have helped his poker play in the way they have some players who seem perfectly happy to reveal deep cleavage at the table, but as Zembic does proudly state, “they haven’t hurt my ability to get girls -they don’t give a shit,” before adding for emphasis, “They really did look nice!”
Whether they have the same effect as Celina Lin claims for the reason behind her display – “research shows that men cannot think as well under situations where blood may be going elsewhere!” stated the Hong Kong poker queen recently – is arguable, but if you are feeling brave you can watch a video of Zembic and his magnificent breasts on our Pokertube Facebook page here and let us know the results!
