Casinos have an incredibly long history, with gambling paraphernalia being found from the Roman era 2000 years ago. Our “top” five will be relatively recent events and will be the wins that are the most interesting, rather than simply the top five largest.
Not the largest outright win but the largest win compared to the stake is from an online casino. In October 2015, British player Jon Heywood won €17,879,645 (Approx £13.2 Million / Approx $20 million) from a single 25p spin on the Mega Moolah progressive jackpot slot. Guinness World Records officially recognized it as the largest online slot machine jackpot ever paid and it was an eye watering 4,469,911 x stake.
It just goes to show that you do not need to have a huge bankroll to hit a Jackpot. For those looking to replicate such a huge win from such a small initial investment there are many online casinos that require only tiny amounts to get going. Some require as little as just a 20 pesos deposit and then the winnings potential is unlimited.
No list of casino victories is complete without Archie Karas who in 1992 turned a borrowed $10,000 into an astonishing $40 million. Karas arrived in Las Vegas with just $50 in his pocket and after getting a loan from a close friend for $10,000 he began playing high-stakes poker. It took time for him to accumulate his fortune and there was no overnight success, but over the next three years, he transformed that money. Karas defeated some of the best poker players in the world, including legends such as Doyle Brunson and Stu Ungar.
He later began playing craps and baccarat, two games where there is no real skill as compared to poker and the house is bound to win but remarkably his winnings skyrocketed even further. His incredible streak of luck became known simply as “The Run,” and many gamblers still consider it the greatest winning streak in casino history.
The next in out list is a comparatively tiny win but it meant everything (and we do mean everything) to the man who placed the bet. In In 2004 Englishman Ashley Revell risked everything on one Roulette spin. He had sold absolutely everything including his clothes and flew to Las Vegas with the cash. On the 11th of April he gambled it all, US$135,300 (about £76,840 at the time) on a single spin of a roulette wheel. Having placed his chips on red, the ball ended up on 7, a red, and Revell doubled his money to US$270,600. The event was filmed by Sky One as a reality mini-series titled Double or Nothing.
Online casinos have pretty low table limits compared to the tables in Vegas, but there are some that have a more relaxed attitude towards accepting big bets. One is 22win ph casino where you can find table limits well above the industry average.
Memorable wins sometimes have a certain degree of controversy attached to them, and our next story is an example of that. In 2012 Professional poker player Phil Ivey won $9.6 million playing Baccarat. This is the game with the lowest house edge and the game of choice for high rolling VIP players. It was at the Borgata Casino in Atlantic City and it was not in itself controversial given the stakes he was playing at. However it transpired that Ivey and his companion used a technique called “edge sorting,” which involved identifying tiny imperfections on the backs of playing cards. It is important to emphasise the word “indentifying” there rather than creating, because to damage the cards himself would have been cheating. While his strategy was not found to involve cheating in the traditional sense, courts later ruled that the winnings had to be returned because the method gave Ivey an unfair advantage.
Finally it is time to look at the largest ever win at a casino. It was back in 2003 when a 25-year-old software engineer from Los Angeles won $39,713,982.25. This was won from a single $3 spin of the Megabucks slot machine at the Excalibur Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. That is the largest absolute win, and it was a return of 1,237,994 x stake. Interestingly he did not get the money all at once but it was paid out in equal amounts over the next 25 years but we would not be complaining about that.
