Gambling's Greatest Wins, Runs, Records and Legends - Part 1

"Daddy, tell me a story," said my little son so many years ago when he was seven. I always told my kids stories at bedtime.

"Once upon a time there was a regular guy named Joe and he went to work every day at the local school where he was a teacher. Joe was a good man and...."

"No, Daddy, tell me a story about giants and monsters and how I kill them," said my son.

"...and one day Joe turned into this hideous monster with two heads and giant teeth who ate all the children in the class and spit out their bones..."

"That's more like it," said my son, "now, I'll be able to go to sleep."

My son was no different from the typical kid of any era; he wanted an outsized story that he could mentally put himself into as an outsized hero who did prodigious things. We casino gamblers are no different, by the way. Check the look on the faces of your fellow low- to medium-rolling casino players as they watch a giant whale (a mega-high roller) betting and winning more money on one hand of blackjack than some of them make in a year. They have a dreamy look that says: "That's really ME playing those hands, and that's MY money, and everyone around ME is watching ME bet all this money and they are all watching ME win all this money. This is really a story that is all about ME!" And when our gambler goes to sleep, he will dream those impossible dreams, just as my little son used to.

But some real, flesh-and-blood gamblers, a fraction of a percent of a fraction of a percent, mind you, get to experience the outsized, the outlandish, the outer limits of gambling's good fortune.

You sometimes read about these folks in the papers; such as how on January 26, 2000, Cynthia Jay-Brennan put $27 in a Megabucks machine at the now-defunct Desert Inn in Las Vegas and won $34,959,458; or how on Sunday, November 15, 1998, a 65 year-old retired flight attendant won $27,582,539 on a Megabucks machine at the Palace Station Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas and how this very same woman, one month previously, had hit for more than $680,000 on The Wheel of Fortune at that same casino; or, for really low-rollers with big dreams, how that fellow who, on July 24, 2000, put in his nickels in the Nickels Deluxe machine at Harvey's Resort Casino in Nevada and won a tidy $1,655,998 and 20 cents!

But giant slot progressives are made for lightning strikes and, strange as it is to say this, there is nothing really "unusual" in winning against those 49,846,031 to 1 odds, since some 120 people have won the coveted Megabucks jackpots nationwide since its creation in 1986.

But how about one- (or two)-of-a-kind stories that aren't shared with 120 people, but are really from the true "once upon a time" school of the fantastic but real? What about stuff that only epic heroes can accomplish or luck so lucky that it occurs only once or twice in a century?