It’s one thing to gamble away a couple of dollars on table games, slots on casinos.com, or a risky parlay on your own, but it’s another to watch wealthy and highly talented professional gamblers do the deed with hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line.
For these folks, gambling isn’t just a fun activity to do on vacation or an occasional pastime—they’ve made a career out of gambling activities by mastering the game. Some of these gamblers have become sort-of celebrities, famous for their astounding net worth, big tournament wins, or pure skill. While others struggle to make any winnings at all, these talents continue raking in cash and setting themselves further and further apart from casual players.
Bill Benter
When we think of wealthy gamblers, games like roulette or poker might come to mind, but Bill (William) Benter focused his efforts on horse gambling—one of the oldest and most classic forms of gambling. Horse racing has a deep-rooted history that was once heavily associated with high society and elegant cultural events like the Royal Ascot.
Benter was wildly intelligent, obtaining a physics degree in 1977 and using his elite math skills to count cards at blackjack tables in Las Vegas. Just seven years after he began doing so, he was completely banned from all the Strip’s casinos. His grasp over numbers continued to help him succeed in gambling, at this point achieving fantastic results with horse race betting in Hong Kong. Eventually, he created one of the most successful analytical software programs in the horse racing industry, earning almost $1 billion.
Kerry Packer
Kerry Packer has a legendary status in the gambling world, but his wealth was built much before his casino ventures. As part of the famed Packer family, Kerry had an ownership interest in one of Australia’s largest corporations, Publishing and Broadcasting Limited. Of course, he was also involved in plenty of other ventures, mainly in gambling and tourism. And although he was dyslexic, he was well-known as a quick-witted businessman.
When he played at the casino, he was well known for wagering at the highest stakes the casinos would allow. After all, he had the cash to do it—so it was no surprise that he quickly became one of the highest rollers in the world. His mere presence in Vegas would set the city alight. Kerry would fly in, gamble for days at a time, and potentially bankrupt casinos if the trip was a success.
Tony Bloom
This list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning a poker player—a gambling form that has produced plenty of wealthy winners around the world. Nicknamed The Lizard, Brighton-born Tony (Anthony) Bloom is known for his cold-blooded gameplay at the table. His first appearance was on the British TV series Late Night Poker, which helped bring poker to the mainstream in the 2000s. Although he began making a name for himself with significant appearances at key events, his first major win put him squarely on the map when he won the first prize of $320,000 in 2004. He continued to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by winning grand prizes worldwide.
Despite his beginnings in poker, his wealth has been mainly attributed to proprietary betting on sports games. Bloom went ahead and set up his own online football betting platform called Premier Bet. As an English football fan, he naturally gravitated towards this as his passion project. Today, he’s also a majority owner and the chairman of Brighton & Hove Albion.
Edward Thorp
Beat the Dealer is a book that mathematically proved that card counting could beat the house advantage in blackjack. Its author? Edward Thorp, a math professor and blackjack researcher from Chicago. Along with focusing on his field of modern applications of probability theory, he learned programming languages, employed the IBM 704 as a research tool, and used his extensive knowledge to develop a groundbreaking blackjack game theory. Not only that, but he also tested his theory first-hand in the land of casinos, Nevada.
With a personal net worth of $800 million, his earnings speak for themselves. He earned a whopping $11,000 on his first weekend of testing his new strategy, and he demonstrated the calculable nature of gambling to the world.
Phil Ivey
Often called the “Tiger Woods of Poker,” based on his appearance and incredible grasp of poker, Phil Ivey has been touted as the best all-around player in the world. With 11 World Series of Poker bracelets, 9 World Poker Tour final table appearances, and 1 World Poker Tour title, he’s got the credentials to back up that claim. Unlike some gamblers on this list, Ivey is an everyday guy who started developing his poker skills against coworkers at a telemarketing firm. He first became interested in the game playing five-card stud with his grandfather as a child, but his remarkable successes today were far from expected.
In 2000, he won his first-ever career bracelet at a Pot Limit Omaha event and became the first person to beat hall-of-famer Amarillo Slim at a WSOP heads-up final. If that wasn’t impressive enough, he went on to win three bracelets at the 2002 WSOP. With so many milestone wins and significant tournament participations following those accomplishments, Ivey became a figurehead in the poker scene. He’s got a career history that would take hours to review and has racked up a net worth of well over $100 million.
