- Richest Gambler In The World
- Top Gamblers In The World
- Top 10 Richest People In The World
- Professional Gamblers List
- Billy Walters Gambler Net Worth
- Most Successful Gamblers
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The concept of gambling has been around almost as long as humanity itself in one sense. Certainly gambling in a form which we would recognise it has existed for thousands of years, with most experts agreeing it dates back to at least 3000 BC. Over the years, a number of people have won vast sums of money through gambling be it on online betting sites or in real life, and while there are some interesting historical cases, we are going to focus on the modern era rather than the master-punters of antiquity.
Deciding who the wealthiest gambler in the world is, depends very much on your criteria and various other factors. We won’t go into all the details; we will just cut straight to the chase. Here are some very rich people who have made, and in some cases lost, a LOT of money gambling over the last 100 years or so.
Poker Millionaires
Gambling comes in many guises these days, with no end of options both online and in the real world. Online poker is hugely popular, but the richest prizes in the game are still handed out each year in Las Vegas at the World Series of Poker.
The Main Event at the annual extravaganza has served up some huge paydays and created some very rich gamblers. Back in 1991, Brad Daugherty became the first person to win $1m at poker’s unofficial world championship, but since then the prizes have grown significantly.
In 2006, Jamie Gold (great name!) won the biggest prize in WSOP history when he took home $12m. There have been two other Main Event winners taking home eight-figure wins, but they actually pale into insignificance next to poker’s biggest ever win at a public tournament.
Chinese ace Aaron Zang scooped £19m (around $23m) by landing the 2019 Triton Million. Mind you, given the buy-in was a cool £1m, you would be hoping to get a serious payout if you won!
Lottery Winners
There have been huge wins on poker, sports betting, and even slots, but in truth, these are made to look like loose change compared to some of the biggest lottery wins ever. Some people might not think of the lottery as gambling, but it is – a view with which the UK Gambling Commission agrees.
There have been some huge wins on the Euromillions in the UK, with an unnamed, and now very rich, player landing €190m in 2012. Similar jackpots have been won on this game by others, but even they are dwarfed by the biggest ever lottery wins.
Spain’s Christmas lottery, nicknamed El Gordo (“the big one”), is considered to be the biggest lottery in the world with a first prize approaching a staggering $1bn, though this is typically shared between many winners.
More recently, the US Mega Millions set a new record for the highest ever single-ticket jackpot win. Almost $900m was paid to a single winner, and in truth, it is hard to disagree that they are the richest gambler in the world.
Mega Wins with Progressive Jackpot Slots
Mega Millions is the biggest lottery, but Mega Moolah is the name of a hugely popular progressive jackpot slot that has created more than a couple of wealthy gamblers. In 2015 British soldier Jon Heywood scooped a cool £13.2m from a 25p spin, believed to be the highest ever win on an online slot.
Mega Moolah has created many other millionaires, but the biggest slots wins have come, once again, in Vegas. The progressive Megabucks slot has paid out $20m on several occasions, but the biggest ever win came back in 2003, when a lucky slots fan scooped a win just shy of $40m!
Big Time Sports Winners
There have also been a number of millionaires created by people betting on sports. Over the years various big accumulators have landed punters seven-figure wins, whilst competitions such as the Coral Football Jackpot and BetVictor Million Pound Bet have also yielded wins of £1m or more.
However, if we’re talking about the richest punters in the world, you’ll need more than “just” a million to figure in the discussion. Several people have won tens and even hundreds of millions through betting, and there are a number of names that are always likely to feature in debates over the identity of the wealthiest gambler ever. Let’s take a look at some of those well-known big hitters.
Zeljko Ranogajec – Biggest Punter
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Zeljko Ranogajec was born in Tasmania, often thought of as being boredom central, in 1961. Perhaps the year of his birth, rather than the place, was a better indication of the path his life would take. The 60s were a time of great freedom and cultural change, and on the other side of the world in the UK this was also the decade when betting shops were legalised and gambling really began to boom.
Ranogajec had a normal upbringing before studying Commerce and Law and was clearly intelligent and gifted with numbers. He began card counting, making good money at the blackjack tables; he was so good in fact that he dropped out of university to focus full time on gambling.
Over the years, the Aussie made huge sums on blackjack, being inducted into the game’s Hall of Fame in 2011. He also reportedly won a A$7.5m Keno jackpot in 1994 and won serious sums playing other casino games too.
However, it is probably betting on horses for which he is most famous, with a feature in Australia’s Daily Telegraph reporting that he bets around A$1bn per year. The newspaper tracked him down in 2010 and asked him if he was the world’s biggest punter, with Ranogajec giving the simple answer, “I believe that’s absolutely untrue.”
He may disagree, but the newspaper’s racing editor said that “he has no challengers as the world’s biggest punter” and a book on the richest gamblers in the world stated that he was the “biggest punter the world has ever seen or is likely to see”. How to play deuces wild video poker.
Ranogajec is a deeply private man about whom little is known, but conservative estimates put his wealth at A$300m, with others believing it to be closer to A$1bn, and a source close to his family is quoted as claiming that he is a multi-billionaire. Not bad from betting on the horses!
Billy Walters – The Mathematician
Billy Walters is another name that frequently crops up in discussions such as this, with the American believed to be worth $200m according to celebrity wealth sites. Believed to be the most successful and richest sports bettor in Las Vegas history, Walters once exploited wheel bias to win almost $4m at the roulette table.
Most of his wealth, however, was garnered betting on sport, usually basketball and American football, both college and NFL. He is thought to use computer analysis to spot value in games and so successful is his method that he enjoyed a winning streak that lasted almost four decades.
Where is Walters now? Florida! Not by a beach drinking cocktails, though, but instead, he is serving time for insider trading in a Pensacola prison. He was sentenced to five years in jail in 2017 and was hit with a $10m fine as well. Key lesson: despite what Gordon Gekko thought, greed is bad.
Alan Woods – The Godfather of Horse Racing
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Another Aussie completes our list, even if he is dead. Alan Woods was born in 1945 in New South Wales, dying at the age of 62 in Hong Kong in 2008. Woods worked with Ranogajec for a time and like his countryman, made his fortune partly from blackjack but primarily from betting on horse racing.
A supreme mathematician, Woods has been described as the “godfather of horse racing software” and he certainly amassed a fortune befitting of a mafia godfather. It is thought he was worth a cool A$670m at his death, much of it made betting on racing in Hong Kong, Australia and around the world.
Archie Karas – The Greek
Some of our biggest winners have also lost considerable sums at other times, but when it comes to the roller-coaster nature of big-time betting, nobody illustrates the story better than Archie Karas. Karas was born in Greece in 1950 and his formative years were spent in extreme poverty.
Such an upbringing affects people differently, but what it did for Karas, nicknamed “The Greek”, was lend him a totally fearless approach to life in general and betting in particular. It is believed that he felt that having experienced such poverty he had nothing to lose and a gambler with no fear can be very dangerous indeed.
He moved to the USA in his youth, having run away from home at the age of 15. He initially made money by hustling pool before becoming even richer playing poker. He would lose a fortune at the poker tables trying to match legends of the gamer like Doyle Brunson and by 1992 he was down to his last $50.
What followed was the stuff of dreams and Hollywood as Karas managed to quickly turn a $10,000 loan into $17m in just a few months. Playing poker and pool and staking with total fearlessness, Karas beat some of the icons of the Vegas poker scene until virtually nobody was prepared to play him.
He continued to find things on which to gamble, playing dice for as much as $100,000 a roll. Less than three years after turning up in Vegas with almost nothing, Karas now had $40m to his name. His streak, perhaps the most lucrative in history, became known, simply, as “The Run” but after the ups, so too came the downs.
Richest Gambler In The World
In 1995 he lost almost all of his $40m fortune in just three weeks, losing eight-figure sums playing dice and baccarat. Since his loss, he has been on a number of smaller streaks, winning and losing amounts of cash that most people will never see.
Sadly the Karas tale is another one that doesn’t end well, with The Greek being arrested in 2013 for marking cards in a San Diego casino. His cheating didn’t, thankfully, end in jail, but a three-year sentence on probation certainly gave him lots to think about. Karas is approaching 70 now, though, and we certainly wouldn’t be surprised to see him go on another streak before he busts out forever.
The life of brian stream. This article will take a look at seven professional gamblers to see how they got to where they are today. While it can sometimes be tricky to know exactly how much money an individual has made from betting, these seven are the richest gamblers out there. Many of them started out just counting cards at their local casinos – several of them have been banned from Las Vegas – but they kept on moving up until they were at the very top of their game.
Patrik Antonius
Patrik Antonius is the youngest gambler on our list, born in 1980 in Helsinki, Finland. He dreamed of being a professional tennis player but had to give the sport up due to a serious back injury. At the young age of 18, Antonius started visiting his local casino and discovered his talent for poker. He is apparently entirely self-taught and claims that he has never read or watched a poker tutorial. He began to make a name for himself by entering poker tournaments, such as the European Poker Tour and World Poker Tour.
Between 2007 and 2016, Antonius accumulated over $17million playing poker online. Despite having said in various interviews that he feels at a disadvantage when playing online since many people use different pieces of software to give themselves an edge, Antonius won the biggest pot in online poker history in 2009: $1,356,946.
Phil Ivey
Phil Ivey reached renown in the world of professional gambling by being the youngest player ever to win ten World Series Poker bracelets. He won his first bracelet in 2000 with an impressive defeat; Ivey beat Amarillo Slim, which was the first time the player had lost at a WSOP final table.
Like some of the other players mentioned here, Ivey began gambling at a young age. Born in California and raised in New Jersey, Ivey’s grandfather taught him to play five-card stud poker when he was only eight years old. Having already developed a love for the game, Ivey got himself a fake ID as a teenager and started visiting casinos in Atlantic City. He turned professional at the age of twenty.
Looking at tournament wins, Ivey is the fifth most successful poker player and has an accumulated net worth of over $23million. Until 2011, he was also the biggest online cash game winner ever; he won over $19million in online poker.
Unfortunately, there is also some bad press surrounding Ivey. In 2011, he won around $12million playing punto banco at Crockfords Casino in London. The casino refused to pay him, claiming that Ivey and his playing partner used a trick known as edge-sorting. Despite maintaining his innocence, the UK courts eventually ruled in favor of the casino and found Ivey guilty of cheating.
Bill Benter
William “Bill” Benter is from Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. He is something of a mathematical genius which probably also came in handy when he studied physics at university. Directly after finishing his degree in 1977, he tried his luck at blackjack in Las Vegas and used his knowledge of math to count cards. He credits a book called Beat the Dealer by Edward Thorp with vastly improving his methods and they were, apparently, excellent methods as Benter was banned from most Las Vegas casinos within seven years of arriving.
After Vegas, Benter moved to Hong Kong in 1984, with a man called Alan Woods. Woods was also a gambler with a head for horse racing. Teamed with Benter’s knowledge of computers, the two of them created a formula to predict the outcome of horse races. This was turned into the world’s first software-assisted gambling operation and it is still considered to be the best there is today. Unfortunately, despite their success working together, the two men had a reportedly “spectacular” falling out and ended their professional relationship. Benter continued to work on his own in Hong Kong.
It is estimated that Bill Benter makes $100million every year and may make between $5million and $10million on a single race day. He is a philanthropist and has given large amounts of money to charity and political groups such as Obama’s presidential campaign.
Zeljko Ranogajec
Zeljko Ranogajec was born in Australia to Croatian parents. He studied commerce and law at the University of Tasmania, but transferred to the University of New South Wales, before dropping out altogether to concentrate on his gambling career.
Ranogajec has a photographic memory which is obviously a great advantage in card counting. Using this and his great understanding of math, he was soon winning big. His methods eventually got him banned from most Australian casinos, so he turned his attention to horse racing instead.
Not much is known about this gambler as he is extremely private and has never given any interviews. His exact net worth is not known, but there has been plenty of speculation. It is rumored that he accounts for 6-8% of the turnover for Tabcorp. A source close to him has described him as a multi-billionaire and while that has not been verified, there is at least a record of him winning $7.5million on one bet in Keno in the 1990s.
Edward Thorp
You may recognize the name Edward Thorp from the section on Bill Benter, as he wrote the book, Beat the Dealer, that Benter claims greatly improved his own gambling prowess. Edward Thorp is actually credited with inventing card counting. He has a Ph.D. in mathematics from UCLA and worked as a math professor from 1959 until 1977, first at MIT, then the New Mexico State University, and the University of California.
Thorp was the first person to use a computer simulation to develop strategies – in his case, for blackjack – and came up with card-counting methods which improved players’ odds. He tested his theories at casinos in Reno, Lake Tahoe, and Las Vegas and when he found that they worked he wrote his book, Beat the Gambler, which has since become known as the ultimate guide to card counting.
Thorp also developed the Thorp Count Method for backgammon and formed a baccarat syndicate. In 1961, he and Claude Shannon invented the first wearable computer and used it at blackjack and roulette tables until 1985 when this practice was banned.
Top Gamblers In The World
In the 1960s, Thorp used his experience and knowledge of statistics on the stock market. Pair a dice games. He also applied very successful hedge fund techniques to the financial markets. Both these ventures, along with gambling, were extremely lucrative, and it is estimated that Thorp’s fortune is around $800million.
Top 10 Richest People In The World
Billy Walters
William “Billy” Walters is somewhat of a legacy gambler, as his father is a professional poker player and his uncle a professional gambler. He was born in Kentucky and placed his first bet when he was only nine years old. He was originally a very unsuccessful gambler, losing $50,000 when he was only 25. However, his luck changed in his 30s and he ran his own bookmaking service. This was actually illegal in Kentucky at the time and Walters was fined $1,000. After this, he moved to Las Vegas, where not a huge amount is known about his operation, but it is clearly very successful.
It is reported that Walters makes around $15million annually, although he has made as much as $2million in a single day. His net worth is estimated at $200million. This is pretty impressive considering he has been banned from many Vegas casinos and most bookmakers will refuse to take his bets. He has other people place many of his bets for him instead, including well-known faces such as Bruce Willis and Ashton Kutcher.
In 2017, Billy Walters was found guilty of insider trading. He reportedly gained $32million in profits and avoided $11million in losses through the trades. He was sentenced to five years in prison and was fined $10million. He is scheduled to be released in February 2022.
Alan Woods
The name Alan Woods should ring a bell, as he is the man who teamed up with Bill Benter to form the most successful horse-racing syndicate in gambling history. Woods wasn’t just a former partner of Benter though, he continued to do well even after the pair went their separate ways.
Born in Australia, Woods began his gambling career counting cards in blackjack. As we know, he moved to Hong Kong with Benter in the 1980s. In 1987, the partnership ended but Woods went on to team up with Zeljko Ranogajec instead in Manila. By the 1990s, Woods had made millions from horse betting, which he viewed as “nothing more than a mathematical equation to be solved”.
Alan Woods died of appendiceal cancer in 2008. He was regarded as one of the best gamblers in the world and had an estimated fortune of AU$670million.
Complete List of the Richest Gamblers in the World Today
As we’ve seen, there are some players and bettors out there who have made not only a career but a fortune out of gambling. All on our list, with the exception of Alan Woods, who sadly passed away in 2008 are still alive. And all of those apart from Billy Walters are still active in the gambling world.
All of the richest gamblers in the world:
Professional Gamblers List
- Patrick Antonius
- Phil Ivey
- Bill Benter
- Zeljko Ranogajec
- Edward Thorp
- Billy Walters
- Alan Woods
Billy Walters Gambler Net Worth
While many of these players are also successful and celebrated poker players, this should not be seen as a list purely of the most successful gamblers of all time. There are those like Alan Woods, who would not appear on that list. Instead, these individuals are those who have made the most money through gambling.
Most Successful Gamblers
If this list has got you in the mood for playing, why not check out our real money casinos, where you can find some of the most high-quality online casinos for real gambling.