Gambling Anecdotes - Short and Sweet
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“Sweet Deal?”
The oil magnate John Gates once placed an $11,000 bet with the wealthy John Drake (whose family had founded Drake University) that his bread, dunked in coffee, would attract more flies than Drake’s. Gates won.It later emerged that he had added six spoonfuls of sugar to his coffee.
“Unexamined Life?”
William Randolph Hearst got his start in business after begging his father, a gold miner turned senator, to let him run the San Francisco Examiner. Did his father harbor a sentimental attachment to the paper? Not exactly. The elder Hearst had acquired the paper as a gambling debt!“Sure Thing”
Shortly before the first world war, British politician and horse racing aficionado Horatio Bottomley devised a sure-fire means of winning a fortune.Prior to a race at Blackenberghe (in Belgium), Bottomley bought each of six competing horses. He then hired six English jockeys and gave them strict instructions concerning the order in which they were to finish the race. As an added precaution, he placed extra bets on all six horses.
Everything went swimmingly until, halfway through the race, a heavy fog blew in from the sea, engulfing the entire course. Judges couldn’t see the horses, jockeys couldn’t see one another, and those who finished at all did so in a muddled jumble.
Only one thing was clear: Bottomley had lost a fortune.
“George Clooney: Blackjack”
One day during the filming of Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven in Las Vegas, George Clooney, a famously unfortunate gambler, joined the rest of the film’s cast on a casino run to play blackjack. Things went even worse than expected. "Twenty-five hands in a row," Damon later marveled. "The odds were mind-boggling... There were professional gamblers in the place who were pulling back their chips until Clooney left."Clooney did leave, but not before borrowing, and promptly losing, $600 of Damon’s money. The next morning, Damon found an envelope which Clooney had slipped beneath his door and was impressed to find a check for $600 inside. Upon closer examination, however, Damon discovered that George had also filled in the "memorandum" section on the check and that, if he wanted to bank it, the cashier would think he had earned $600... for lap dancing.
These gambling stories courtesy of: Anecdotage.com
