At this moment you thought you are going to be reading an interesting article that will inspire you to follow the footsteps of famous gamblers who went from rags to riches. Well, that ain’t going to happen. Hold on a minute; we have just included the phrase “break the bank”. There is a reason why we have done that. We are just trying to avoid people falling victims of misconceptions on this one.

Therefore, what does “break the bank mean”? Well, basically we just talking about the most significant sum of money that most lucky ladies and gentlemen have won throughout their time of enjoying gambling.

But can anyone break the bank these days? Most casino tables encompass $100,000 worth of chips so that they can provide high stakes gamblers with an immediate payout. In the event that a sum goes beyond that. The best online slots staff will go to a vault and take the cash that they need.

An Early Bird Gets the Perfect Worm

This is one of the proverbs that can be recapped way back to the 17th century. And we have a very strong assumption that gamblers are the ones who came up with it. People have come up with this idea that casino activities are night activities. But a 74-year-old American lady proved it wrong by winning a staggering sum of money before breakfast time.

Basketball Can Bring You Millions

We are not exactly talking about the professional side of the game right now, we don’t want you to start checking NBA players’ salaries. According to some biggest gambling websites, there was a guy whose name nobody knows decided that if he didn’t play the game of Basketball it still could help him become wealthy. But at that very moment, he didn’t realize it. Rewinding back to 2003, this man wanted to spend some lonely time and he decided to attend a basketball match too early. The beauty part was that there was a casino nearby and he went on and spent $100 and guess what? He went on and win $40 million worth of cash.

For those who enjoy the old-fashioned allure of a bricks and mortar casino, the name Genting will be immediately familiar. The Malaysia-based company operates around 40 different casinos in the UK alone – more than any other company. When gaming fans visit a Genting casino, they know exactly what to expect. And the quick and easy membership process means that joining one casino means the gamer has joined them all.

 

Some might argue that while the uniformity of the service offering might represent a great business model, it does mean that the experience can become a little routine. In other words, when you’ve visited one, you’ve visited them all. That’s true to an extent. However, what many people fail to realize is that the Genting model started from one man making his impossible dream a reality. Let’s take a look at the remarkable story of Highlands Resort Malaysia.

 

A man with a dream

 

In 1964, industrialist and entrepreneur Lim Goh Tong was on a business trip in Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands. He was immediately taken with the fresh, mountain air and decided that his home city of Kuala Lumpur needed something similar. Only he wanted to create more than just a hotel. He envisaged a casino resort the like of which Malaysia had never seen.

 

Now today, large scale developments are commonplace. Likewise, casinos are popping up in both the physical and virtual worlds every day, and we can visit one in a major city or play live table games in cyberspace whenever we like. Despite all this, Lim Goh Tong’s idea still sounds ambitious. Now consider the context of 1960s Malaysia. There wasn’t a casino in the entire country, and as for a mountain – well, the closest one to Kuala Lumpur was around 200KM away, covered in dense forest and completely devoid of basic essentials like a water or electricity supply.

 

The dream becomes a reality

 

These, however, were simply obstacles that had to be negotiated, and that is exactly what the Genting pioneer did. Over six years, he cleared around 10,000 acres of forest, and created an entire infrastructure of roads and utilities to make his dream of a mountain resort into a reality. In 1971, the Malaysian Government granted Genting Resort the country’s first casino license. 38 years later, they have yet to issue a second one, so Genting remains a unique destination on the Malaysia tourist trail.

 

Despite its monopoly when it comes to Malaysia’s land-based gambling market, the resort has not stood still. While the Genting name has spread across the globe, Lim Goh Tong’s mountain getaway has moved with the times, too. Today, visitors can arrive in style by cable car, and when they get there, there’s plenty to do, even for those who are not keen gamblers. Resorts World Genting, as it is now known, has become a family destination, offering shops, fine dining and even supervised children’s entertainment. That’s ideal for parents who need something for the youngsters to do in safety while they check out the adult playground inside!

The history of gambling, in Las Vegas and elsewhere, is awash with ‘rags to riches’ and, indeed, ‘riches to rags’ stories, but none is quite as dramatic, on both counts, as the story of the gambler popularly known as Archie Karas. Born Anargyros Karabourniotis in Kefalonia, Karas had already won, and lost, millions of dollars playing high-stakes poker in Los Angeles before arriving in Las Vegas with a mere $50 to his name. Having secured a loan of $10,000 from an associate – whom he repaid, double, with 24 hours – Karas embarked upon the longest documented winning streak in gambling his story. Between 1992 and 1995, he played high-stakes poker against some of the best players in the world, including Stu Ungar and Chip Reese, and amassed $40 million. However, when his fortunes took a turn for the worse, they did so catastrophically; in the space of two months, he lost the whole £40 million playing baccarat and craps for astronomically high stakes, as was his custom. Looks like he should’ve stuck to poker, or in this, the internet age, pokieslistings.com to keep his baalnce balance moving in the right direction.

Of course, plenty of other people have gone from poverty to wealth, and vice versa, as the result of gambling activities of one form or another. Historically, Charles De Ville Wells, later dubbed ‘Monte Carlo’ Wells, was one of the men who broke the bank at Monte Carlo. In 1891, using what he described as an ‘infallible system’, Wells turned $4,000 into $1 million, or the equivalent of about $28 million by modern standards.

Much more recently, in 2005, 92-year-old World War II veteran Elmer Sherwin achieved what he called his ‘life’s dream’ when winning the progressive jackpot on a Megabucks slot machine for the second time. Sherwin won his first Megabucks jackpot, $4.6 million, at the Mirage, on the Las Vegas Strip, in 1989 and thereafter actively pursued winning it again. His persistence finally paid off when, sixteen years later, at the Cannery Casino in North Las Vegas, he lined up the ‘Megabucks’ symbols again and won $21.1 million for his $3 stake. There have been some massive Megabucks slots wins over the years, so Elmer has joined an elite group.

On the darker side, former Fry’s Electronics’ executive Ausaf Umar ‘Omar’ Siddiqui reportedly spent $162 million – $65 million of which he defrauded from his employer – in Las Vegas in a three-year period from 2005 onwards. Siddiqui was subsequently charged with money laundering and wire fraud. In a similar vein, in what was later described as a ‘year-long gambling binge’, Chinese businessman and celebrated high-roller Terry Watanabe lost nearly $127 million, mainly playing blackjack, badly, at Caesars Palace and the Rio in Las Vegas in 2007.