By Nick Tedeschi and Tim Napper
For most, having a bet involves a wager on the footy or an interest in the horses, a hand of blackjack, a scratch of a scratchy or a dip at the lotto jackpot. Australians do it with bookmakers and casinos, at the TAB and home games, and at their local club. The opportunity to gamble is around nearly every corner. Indeed, per capita Australians are the biggest gamblers (and unfortunately, biggest losers) in the world.
Yet very few of us have indulged in the proposition bets or the mammoth gambles that have made names like Casanova and Bergstrom, or Hennigan and Brunson or Revell famous and infamous in the gambling world. Below, in no particular order, are ten of the strangest and most bizarre bets made and won and lost through history.
1) A man by the moniker of Andrei Karpov once put his wife on the table in a game of poker he believed he was about to win (no, this wasn’t in the Wild West, this was in 2007). He, of course, lost the hand. When his opponent – Sergey Brodov – came to collect, Karpov’s wife was so incensed that she demanded an immediate divorce, and started a relationship with the man who had ‘won’ her. They eventually married. His ex-wife has said, “’Sergey was a very handsome, charming man and I am very happy with him, even if he did “win” me in a poker game.‘”
Ah, those crazy Russians.
2) In 2004, a 32 year-old Englishman named Ashley Revell decided he was going to go for it all (for a video of this, see the Making the Nut Facebook page). Keen on a wager, Revell thought it a wise idea to sell everything he owned, right down to his clothing, and double it through on the roulette wheel. His friends thought him mad and his family thought him stupid. But he ploughed on with his insane wish, on to Vegas, even getting the event filmed for a television show called ‘Double or Nothing’. He placed $135,300 – the sum of all his worldly possessions – on red, based purely on the vote of his family and friends.
He initially intended on placing the lot on black.
As the wheel turned and turned and turned, as slow as the earth turns past the sun for Revell, thoughts of glory, despair, victory and desolation filled his head. The ball bobbled and bounced before eventually finding its slot. Red seven. He had made the ultimate double through.
That was it for Revell; he made no more bets that day. Rather, he gave $600 to a dealer as a tip, said “thank you!”, and left the casino.
3) William Lee Bergstrom did something similar, but wasn’t quite as sensible as Revell (if putting your life savings on the spin of a Roulette wheel can be considered ‘sensible’). In 1980 he walked into the celebrated Horseshoe Casino in downtown Vegas and asked to bet the entirety of his wealth: $777,000. The Horseshoe accepted the bet, which was placed on the craps table – the ‘Don’t Pass’ line to be accurate. His bet was won after two throws of the duelling dice. The Suitcase Man, as he became known, collected his winnings and left.
Had he have stayed away, he most likely would have remained happy and alive. But the temptation to go again was too large and he returned a few years later, this time wanting to place a cool million on one bet. The bet was taken and this time it was the house that came up trumps. Bergstrom later committed suicide in his Vegas hotel room.
4) On the eve of 1990, one Welsh punter decided to take a small financial interest on the events of the next decade. Clearly a devoted follower of pop culture, the Welsh gent walked into Ladbrokes in Newport and put thirty quid on an accumulator that was paying 6,479-1. The all-up was based on certain events occurring before and included Cliff Richard being knighted (4-1), U2 remaining together (3-1), Eastenders remaining on BBC (5-1), Neighbours remaining on television (5-1) and Home and Away (8-1). A decade after placing his bet he wandered into Ladbrokes and sought collection of ₤194,400. He got it. A nice little earner.
5) Inveterate womanizer and gambling tragic Giacomo Casanova (yes, we are talking about the Casanova) once had a wager on who could gamble the longest. Casanova was known to have a gambling problem. Indeed, he often used his romantic abilities with women encourage them to help him pay back gambling debts or acquire a roll to gamble with.
Way back in the mid-1700s, Casanova was caught up in a game of piquet (a card game) with a player who was apt to leaving after recording a small profit. Casanova goaded the man into a wager. The two were to play without leaving the room for more than fifteen minutes (for a bathroom break) or falling asleep.
At some stage during the 42 hour contest his opponent was delivered melted chocolate in order to help him stay awake. His opponent was struggling, unable to keep track of the action as they played and suffering the occasional minor hallucination. Eventually, while being fed soup, he passed out, face first, in the bowl. Casanova was declared the winner.
We don’t know how much Casanova won in the bet, but we can hardly omit it in our list.
6) Back in the days before online poker, when one couldn’t simply log in and get some high-stakes action (though of course you can’t at the moment anyway if you’re living in the US), Johnny ‘World’ Hennigan took an unusual bet (he earned his nickname for being willing to bet on anything in the world).
Anyway, six-figure bet, made with the high-stakes poker players he regularly gambled with, was this: that he’d be able to spend six weeks living in the ultra-quiet city of Des Moines, Iowa. A place where, at the time of the bet, there were no casinos. Hennigan figured he’d work on his golf game. The other guys knew that Johnny couldn’t stand to be away from the action one week, never mind six.
He lasted two days.
7) Over the years, weight loss bets have been a staple of the proposition bet. Doyle Brunson has said that he has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on bets that he’d shed some pounds. But he made up for it in 2003 when a consortium of players offered 10/1 on a $100,000 wager that he would not be able to get below 300lb. Thanks to Weight Watchers and Atkins, Brunson shed the fat and cleared $1m in winnings.
The magnitude of the Brunson bet was in the same class of the famous weight loss bet between Mike Matusow and Ted Forrest. The bet was this, that Forrest (who is not a very big guy) could not lose 50 pounds (about 22 kilograms) in 2 months. The bet was for a lazy 2 million.
Forest told ESPN that towards the end of the bet, he didn’t eat for ten days. He then ate “a kiwi, a tomato and five or six raspberries” in the last couple of days to have enough strength to work out. And he made it, weighing in at 138 pounds (60 kilograms) on the last day of the bet.
Matusow is apparently on a payment plan for the next decade or two.
8) Another online poker player, Ashton Griffin, took on an insane endurance bet with his friend Haseeb Qureshi. After a night out drinking heavily, Griffin on a whim bet 300,000 he could run 70 miles within 24 hours on a treadmill. Even worse than this drunken proposition was this: he laid 3-1 odds. So if he lost, he’d owe his friend 900,000.
Haseeb was worried that Ashton could suffer permanent physical injuries – or even die – from taking on such an arduous bet. If you read his recollection of the story, he was tormented by this thought. Having said that, it should be noted that at no point did he actually try to stop Ashton from doing it. As it turned out, Ashton won, with 45 minutes to spare.
9) In 2008, high-stakes online cash gamer Andrew Robl challenged his pal Jay Kwik to spend 30 days living in a bathroom at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. Numerous parameters were established, including his access to food, a DVD player, and a strictly limited number of cell phone minutes. He couldn’t use a computer or have company in his room. A webcam was even mounted outside the bathroom to supervise the wager.
Robl was apparently confident in his gamble, but what he didn’t factor in was Kwik being a desperado hustler who – according to many who really know him – would probably had lived in the bathroom just for food and board (this is the Bellagio, after all). Kwik did his time so easily that Robl bought him out of the wager early, for a reported $40,000.
10) You’ve no doubt heard about this one. The famous ‘breast implant bet’. Brian Zembic, a professional backgammon / poker / Blackjack player, was offered a wager by his gambling buddies: $100,000 if he had breast implants. Zembic must have needed the dough – or liked the idea – because he went under the knife and got some 36C additions. He won the bet, but the kicker to this story is that Zembic kept the breasts. He apparently loves them.
Making the Nut has seen pictures of the guy. It’s true that he kept them. Disturbingly true.
Special mention must go to the great novelist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a noted gambler. Dostoyevsky was so deep in gambling debt that made a deal that he would write a novel within a few months as payment. If he didn’t finish the book, he would hand over the publishing rights and royalties of all the novels he’d ever written. Not only did he manage write the book in time, ironically the book was The Gambler – probably the greatest novel about compulsive gambling ever written.
These bets are the strange and verbose, desperate and weird, the life-changing. These punters have seized the moment, for good or ill, and put their fate in the winds of the Gambling gods.
Don’t try this at home.
This article first appeared in Making the Nut