Tag Archives: Celebrities who love gambling

Celebrities who love gambling, Addicted to Winning!

There’s something about the adrenaline rush of scoring a huge win on the slots or at the blackjack tables that proves irresistible to even the truly rich and famous. Celebrities who gamble aren’t really any different from us. It’s just that when your next film, television series or sporting season can earn you a seven figure sum, your speculative punt gone wrong is the equivalent of our bank-busting bad-break. Charlie Sheen had a reputation for wild gambling – his ex-wife, Denise Richards, claimed he was losing $200K a week at the time of their divorce. However, given that Sheen once bought over 2,600 tickets to a baseball game, just so that he would have a better chance of being first to any balls pumped into the stands, we’re suspecting his losses didn’t bother him much. Much the same could be said of former basketball star Charles Barkley, who seems unrepentant about having lost an estimated $10 million in gambling, including one $100K bet that he lost betting on the 2012 Super Bowl final. The losses aren’t always harmless though, and Barkley’s figure pales into insignificance compared to the $50 to $60 million that fallen golf-star John Daly claims to have lost – including $1.65 million that he lost in five hours playing the slots.

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Football has been ripe territory for small fortunes lost, with participants throwing away huge sums that they don’t need on bets that they can’t resist. Wayne Rooney supposedly ran up a £700K debt on sports betting, while John Terry remortgaged his mansion four times allegedly in order to pay back gambling debts. Blackburn and Scottish defender Colin Hendry filed for bankruptcy after becoming addicted to spread betting. Not every footballer has found gambling to be a money-sink, though. Teddy Sheringham won £77K in a single poker tournament, and has racked up significant earnings on the circuit for some years now.

Indeed, where there are celebrity success stories, they do tend to centre around the highly skilled world of poker, where calm nerves combined with the ability to calculate the true odds of winning a hand can be a passport to glittering success.Ben Affleck gamblingPerhaps the most high-profile poker player is movie star Ben Affleck, whose ability to take on the world’s best and come out significantly ahead has been mentioned in numerous publications. His biggest tournament win remains the $356,000 he picked up in the California State Poker Championship – gaining him a ticket to the World Poker Tour. The most successful poker player in Hollywood, though, might well be the secretive Tobey Maguire. The Spiderman star doesn’t like to talk about his poker skills, but his discreet forays into the backroom cash games of the rich and famous are rumored to have secured him earnings in excess of $10 million. Here in the UK, columnist, wit and Only Connect quiz-show host Victoria Coren has made considerable sums at poker, even winning £500K on the London leg of the 2006 European Poker Championships.

Those are the exceptions, though. Like the majority of us, it seems, celebrities who gamble do it mostly for entertainment and for the sheer excitement of risking something significant on the throw of a dice or the spin of a roulette wheel. It’s just that their ‘something significant’ tends to be on a rather different scale to ours. The last twelve months have seen the rise of the Twitter betting contests, where celebrities try to outdo one another with the pictures of their latest win. 50-CentHotshot boxer Floyd Mayweather and rapper 50 Cent (pictured)have raised this almost to an art form, photographing themselves surrounded by the piles of money scored with their latest wagers. Whether their bets are really making them profits over the long term has been questioned though. After all, if you’re betting sizable sums, you can claim to be winning very big indeed – just as long as you aren’t as truthful about your losses. Celebrities, then, aren’t really so very unlike the rest of us..