Category: News

Becoming a professional gambler requires skill, determination, a clear head, and good concentration. Gamblers can reach unprecedented heights and it sometimes comes down to one major win. Over the last decade, there are a select few that have risen to the top of the pack, making a living betting on horse racing, and playing poker, slots, and much more.

While it takes time (and often good luck) to become a full-time professional gambler, a select few have made it, becoming the richest in the world. So, who are the players you need to watch out for?

Billy Walters

You might not think sports betting would earn you a spot among the world’s richest gamblers, but that’s not entirely true. Billy Walters proved the theory that sports betting can actually be profitable for the average player. He is an example to those who love a flutter on football.

With an estimated net worth of $250 million, the Billy Walters story began quite humble. At age nine, he used earnings from his local newspaper round to bet. He continued to enhance his skills and craft a successful career in sports betting.

Walters is one of the richest gamblers of all time. He even went on to building a sports betting company in LA. Unfortunately, he was sentenced to five years in prison for inside trading. He was pardoned by Donald Trump in 2020 when he was released. Despite this, he remains one of the more successful gamblers in the United States and the world.

William (Bill) Benter

Bill Benter is originally from Pennsylvania and earned a degree in physics. With his vast in-depth knowledge of mathematics, Bill started his career on the biggest stage in America – Las Vegas. He soon became a professional gambler from an early age and was a force to be reconned with. Unfortunately, after winning most of the blackjack tournaments (seven years consecutively), he was banned. That is how good this gambler is.

Bill soon moved to Hong Kong and focused his attention on the horse racing scene. He perfected a winning formula for predicting the outcome of races and helped him earn his vast fortune. Bill Benter remains one of the most successful professional gamblers in history, if not the most successful. He is thought to have a net worth of $1 billion.

Edward Thorp

While Edward Thorp had a successful career elsewhere, he quickly climbed the ladder to become one of the most successful professional gamblers of all time. Thorp began his career as a mathematics professor and become an established author. He invented the first wearable computer with Claude Shannon in 1961. Thorp is also a professional blackjack player and worth an estimated $800 million.

Edward Thorp quickly delved into the casino world and moved onto Wall Street to predict market anomalies. He wrote the book, Beat the Market in which he explained how to use stocks to earn money. It was a huge hit and has become a Blackjack Hall of Fame member. His skills are second to none and are incredibly ingenious.

Phil Ivey

Phil Ivey is one of the world’s richest professional gamblers of all time. A professional poker player, Ivey is thought to be worth $100 million. His winnings have come from online games and many live poker tournaments. Ivey is also the ten-time World Series of Poker Champion and a World Poker Tour Champion.

Ivey really is one of the best poker players the world has ever seen. His talents and skills at the poker table are extraordinary and continue to be a force on the poker scene. In 2009, he defeated 147 fellow poker players to win his sixth tournament bracelet and the Commerce Casino LA Poker Classic. Phil Ivey is a player that tops the list for all the right reasons – because he deserves it. His wins aren’t out of luck, but skill and talent.

Chris Ferguson

Another exquisite poker player, Chris Ferguson first started his poker journey at a very young age. In the 1990s, he began to enter poker tournaments and entered his first world series poker tournament in 1995. He has become one of the richest and most successful gamblers in the United States. In 2000, he earned the title of main event champion after winning the tournament and is thought to have a net worth of $80 million.

Ferguson is innovative and hugely successful. He remains the only poker player to have won six WSOP bracelets and win three WSOP circuits also. His skills are impressive and have earned a stellar reputation for his abilities at the poker table.

Big Six, also known Big Six Wheel or Wheel of Fortune, is a popular casino game, that draws the crowd. It’s especially popular in Las Vegas. It involves a vertical wheel, six feet in diameter, divided into 54 equal segments. Typically, 52 of the 54 segments are marked with numbers representing dollar amounts – usually $1, $2, $5, $10 and $20 – while the remaining two are marked with a joker and a casino logo. Each segment is separated from the next by spokes which, by means of frictional interaction with stationary ‘clapper’, made of leather or rubber, at the top of the wheel, bring the wheel to a halt at the end of each spin.

Fairly obviously, the idea of the game is for players to predict on which, of the six possible segments, the clapper, or stopper, will fall.The payout odds, probabilities and house edge vary slightly from one version of Big Six to another across the globe but, under Las Vegas rules, odds range from even money, or 1/1, for the $1 segment to 40/1 for one of the logo segments. Unsurprisingly, the probability of winning ranges from 44.44% to 1.85% and the house edge – which, at best, is one of the highest to be found in casino games – ranges from 11.11% to 24.07%. To put those figures in perspective, the probability of winning a bet on a joker or logo segment on Big Six is less than that of making three of kind in a hand of poker.

The former Portuguese colony of Macau, or Macao, is the only part of the People’s Republic of China in which casino gambling is legal. Nevertheless, while gross gambling revenues in Macau fell 5%, year-on-year, in January, 2019 to $3.1 billion, according to government figures, the fall was the first for two-and-a-half years. Known as the ‘Vegas of the East’, Macau is the most densely populated region in the world and its burgeoning gambling economy is a shining example of what can happen when a huge, increasingly wealthy population is exposed to legalised gambling.

Even in countries not always associated with being gambling such as New Zealand spent the equivalent of $648 each on gambling in 2018. $895m in total was spent on pokies (slots).

The United States is, of course, home to the City of Las Vegas, Nevada, which is billed as the ‘Entertainment Capital of the World’ and attracted over 42 million visitors. In the U.S. as a whole, gambling revenues are invariably in excess of $150 billion, with pari-mutuel, legal bookmaking and lottery revenues the major contributors. Several gambling and sports betting regulations have been relaxed and sports betting is legal and making a comeback, so gambling revenues are only likely to increase in years to come.

The United Kingdom has a fraction of the population of China or the United States and British casinos – of which there are apparently 152, according to the latest figures from the Gambling Commission – are ‘small beer’ compared with those in, say, Las Vegas or Macau. Nevertheless, the minimum legal to gamble in Britain is 18, as opposed to 21 for Macau residents and residents and foreigners in many U.S. states and Britons invest heavily on lotteries, sports betting, poker and other gambling activities. According to the Gambling Commission, the total gross gambling yield for the industry as a whole, in the year ending September, 2018, was a respectable £14.5 billion.

 

Ace-king – often known as ‘Big Slick, if suited, and ‘Big Ugly’, if not – is a strong, and therefore favourite, starting hand in Texas hold’em poker. Ace-king is, of course, a ‘drawing hand’ or, in other words, a hand that has the potential to become very strong indeed, but needs to hit the board in order to do so. Nevertheless, before the first three community cards, collectively known as ‘the flop’, are dealt, ace-king can be considered likely to win against any non-paired hand. The probability of ace-king beating, say, ace-queen is 71.62%. Indeed, even against any pair less than a pair of kings, the odds of winning with ace-king in the hole are still roughly 50:50.

Paired aces or kings are more problematic; paired aces reduce the probability of ace-king winning to just 5.86%, while paired kings reduce the probability to 29.74%. So, while ace-king is, no doubt, a valuable hand in Texas hold’em poker, its real value needs to be considered in the context of the position of the holder, the number of players in the game and their playing styles. Granted that ace-king will almost certainly lose if it fails to hit the board, it may be judicious to play the hand passively – that is, as a typical drawing hand – if you are facing, say, four or more opponents, but to play the hand aggressively in a heads up situation.