Quote:
Originally Posted by Brussels Sprout
Nick "The Greek" Dandalos surely should get a mention.
Managed to lose an estimated $2-4m Heads up to Johnny Moss in 1949 (roughly $25m-$50m in today's money)
Ayyyyy great pick. I just watched something about him, too – might have been a cutaway thing on an old High Stakes Poker episode.
As for Andy Beal, does anyone recall the net loss he incurred? I'm too lazy to pore through my copy of The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King. Some half-assed internet research is giving me $16 million as the most frequent answer, but that number appears to be the one final session with Ivey. i.e. if Beal was (say) up by $10 million going in, then his net was -$6 million. If he was already down by $10 million when sat down with Ivey, then obviously his net loss was almost $24 milly.
Anyway, I also don't count Beal as a degenerate gambler, at least in terms of the way I think of that term. For starters, he was very aware of what he was getting into, knew full well the skill level of his opponents, hoped he could neutralize the skill gap by raising the stakes to the point of discomfort (for the Corporation members, not him), then decided to call it quits once he ended up losing. All of that strikes me as being in full control, which is something a degen gambler does not have.
And to reiterate what borg and 29offutgshove already noted, an eight-figure loss is a fraction of a percentage point of his net worth (which Forbes lists as $11.5 billion as of this post). Take your own net worth, then divide it by 850. If you lost that amount playing poker, would anyone suddenly worry you have a serious problem? Realistically, the most degenerate gamblers are probably people we've never heard of, simply because the amounts of money at stake are too small to notice or garner any public attention. But obviously those cases are less fun for this thread.
Finally, if anyone is interested in a somewhat amusing case of gambling degeneracy, go look up an old acquaintance of my parents. A woman named Toshi van Blitter got caught up in two different lawsuits arising from her gambling losses in the 1980s. I can't remember the exact details, but in one of the cases, her defense was that the casino did not help her get better at the game. It was such a ridiculous case that it made some headlines at the time, and I think might have been mentioned during SNL's Weekend Update.