Gambling Anecdotes - Short and Sweet
“Eighteenth Century Vegas” |
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“Bankruptcy Hearing”
During the course of his bankruptcy hearing, Wilfrid Hyde-White was examined by a somewhat exasperated official receiver. "Mr. Hyde-White," he remarked, "if you cannot tell us how you spent such a large sum in so short a time, perhaps you could tell us what will win the Gold Cup at Ascot this afternoon, since I understand you would already like to be on your way?" "Of course, dear fellow," Hyde-White replied, naming a horse. "But only have a small bet," he wryly added. "We don’t want to have to change places, do we?"“Slim Preston: Straight Flush”
Esquire writer and amateur gambler James McManus once recalled his first Poker Million tournament. "I hadn’t been shy about stealing Slim Preston’s blinds [the mandatory bets posted by players to the left of the dealer], if only for the pleasure of messing with a legend," he recalled. "’That boy’s raised me 71 times in a row,’ he complained, trying to make my wheels turn by implying that this time he’d damn-well retaliate."Leaning back in my chair to see past the dealer, I tried to get a read on him. From beneath his rattle-snake adorned Stetson he stared straight ahead, looking more than a little like Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, then suddenly turned his laser-blue eyes on me, piercing my polarized lenses. ’Son,’ he said, ’if you can figure out sumthin’ ’bout mah hand from starin’ at me, ah’ll let you shit in this hat.’
"Bursts of laughter from around the table... I had to laugh, too, if only from the jolt of being messed with by a legend. Mucking my K-7 less out of fear than deference, I watched Slim flip over a 10-2."
“Norm Macdonald: Bad Luck, Sir!”
Over the course of his gambling career, Norm Macdonald won thousands of dollars playing blackjack in Atlantic City. He left one casino with a paper bag containing $50,000 worth of orange chips and hid them in his refrigerator.Of course, Macdonald also lost big money, most often at Los Vegas casinos. "One time I was down $15,000, and I wanted to win it back quickly so I bet my last $5,000," he recalled. "I got two aces, and I couldn’t split them because I had no more money. So I hit and got a 10. I hit again and got another 10. If I could have split, I would have gotten two 21s. Instead, I went over. Then I had to pull back from the table and walk to my room. The worst is when you leave in a haze and the dealer shouts, ’Bad luck, sir!’"
“The Professor”
"Silvan Tomkins was from Philadelphia, the son of a dentist from Russia. He was short, and slightly thick around the middle, with a wild mane of white hair and huge black plastic-rimmed glasses...""During the Depression, in the midst of his doctoral studies at Harvard, he worked as a handicapper for a horse-racing syndicate, and was so successful that he lived lavishly on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. At the track, where he sat in the stands for hours, staring at the horses through binoculars, he was known as the Professor.
"He had a system for predicting how a horse would do based on what horse was on either side of him, based on their emotional relationship," psychologist Paul Ekman once explained.
"If a male horse, for instance, had lost to a mare in his first or second year, he would be ruined if he went to the gate with a mare next to him in the lineup. (Or something like that — no one really knew for certain.)"
These gambling stories courtesy of: Anecdotage.com
