Casino Tales of the Unexpected

People play at live and online casinos for a variety of reasons – for fun, to pass the time on holiday, some playing professionally and some in the hope of that one life-changing score.

The most newsworthy, as we saw recently when Dorothy Boone scooped $1.3million, have their life changed purely by chance, the Texan not even supposed to be in Lake Tahoe. A last-minute change of travel plans was a stroke of casino millionaire casino good fortune.

Let’s take a look at some other amazing stories from around the world’s casino tables… 

Slots

If you considered $1.3million to be enough reason to host a party, imagine the celebration when a Swedish woman scooped €7.6million playing online slots.

‘The Hall of Gods’ was the anonymous winner’s game of choice and aptly named after it provided a lifetime windfall in 2012.

A few years later, it was Australia that provided an even bigger slots winner, Microgaming’s the Dark Knight slot providing the whopping AU$10,423,223 ($7.8 million) jackpot.

 Perhaps the luckiest yet in the slots’ stakes was the young Norwegian who couldn’t sleep – his lack of forty winks turning into an €11.7million online win, that then kept him up for hours trying to calm down.

Of course, slots aren’t the only attractions of online casinos, customers able to play every version of their favourite real-life games.

Bingo

Once the preserve of the blue-rinse brigade on the high street, online Bingo has since become one of the biggest pastimes of choice – and for one stay-at-home mum her love for the game turned into a £250,000 fortune.

Jade Payne from Lowestoft in England spent only £10 on her Bongo stake, and was staggered when her numbers came in.

“I couldn’t believe it when my final numbers came around,” she explained. “It was so exciting to see them drop into place; winning such an incredible sum of money was an amazing feeling."

For Jade it meant an end to financial worries, and she decided to treat her father and brother, as well as find a new house for her and the kids.

For one Scottish woman, a mixture of Bongo and slots led to a £1.2million bank balance booster. Mandy Bowman had poekcted £400 at online Bingo and then decided to round off a nice evening with some slots.

A Ching-ching and kaboom later, Mandy had landed the £1.2million jackpot, and that led to her life-long dream of opening an indoor horse-riding school

Roulette

Huge online roulette jackpots seem to be notable by thehir absence, which is strange given that some of the most amazing casino stories revolve around that spinning white ball…

British businessman Ashley Revell has a don’t-try-this-at-home story to last an eternity, selling his house, car and his life’s possessions to place everything on red.

His Vegas adventure was filmed for TV as it happened, and luckily for Ashley his incredible gamble paid off – the double-or-nothing bet making him instantly famous.

Lucky numbers play a huge part in casinos, and if it doesn’t always win, when it does it’s magical.

Uruguayan businessman Pedro Bartelle scooped $3.5million with his lucky 32 at French roulette, while Newcastle United football club owner Mike Ashley centred his £1million+ winning bet around the number 17.

Poker

Everyone knows that poker has a special spot in a casino, and the same goes for the online version – but the pokerroom isn’t always devoid of the luck factor.

Minnesota’s Christian Pham found that out when he registered for the wrong tournament by accident, and paid $1500 to do so.

Sitting with 5 cards instead of his usual two, not knowing even the most basic rules, Pham nevertheless picked it up as he went along – winning the tournament, $81,314 and a World Series of Poker gold bracelet to go with it.

Jake Cody knows a thing or two about both live and online poker, but it was his roulette exploits that saw him in the news a couple of years ago.

Having just scooped a £42,670 ($59,992) payday at his poker event, Cody put it all – every last penny of it – on the spin of the roulette wheel.

This time it was Black the player and spectators were rooting for, and lo and behold, Cody had a new favourite number to go with his colour, the ball landing on 22 black and doubling his money. 

Blackjack

Blackjack is one of those games that everyone knows how to play, at least the basics – a score of 21 the best you can get.

Live dealer online casinos have become a standard offering, with blackjack one of the most popular among them, as you can see from this $10,000 win below…

We’ve yet to see anyone sharing details of a win as big as that of Australian billionaire Kerry Packer at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, though.

Packer totalled some $40million in a 40-minute winning streak, but be warned, he also lost almost $30million in another blackjack session. Easy come, easy go when you have $billions. 

Craps

Until fairly recently, you’d be lucky to find yourself a craps game on the internet, but the advent of the live dealer, live streamed casino tables changed all that.

Now you can wager and watch as real dice are rolled – no RNG (Random Number Generators) involved.

All the way back in 1989, Stanley Fujitake set what must have been records at the time, 3 hours, 118 rolls and $1,000,000 – and a new nickname emerged, the Golden Arm, for the luckiest dice players.

We’ll round off our look at the best, the biggest and luckiest of casino winners with the man who broke Fujitake’s Craps record, ‘Mr Royalty’.

Unlikely to be his real name, ‘Mr Royalty’ came from a European Royal family and scooped $4.6million in Las Vegas in just 6 hours. Not content with that, the nobleman returned a week later to top it up with another $1.5million Craps win.

Well, whether you’re happier playing at your online casino, or prefer the interaction of the bricks and mortar variety, or even both, that old Vegas saying covers them all – good luck at the tables!