Biggest Bet on a Single Hand
My biggest bet was in blackjack. I was counting cards online and one time I bet 20k.
I waited for a positive deck and started betting 1000. The deck kept improving, but as often happens, I was losing and gradually raising my bets. I was down about 20k and the deck was getting better and better, so I decided to bet on 3 boxes at 5k each. I don’t think this was a good decision bankroll management wise. But I was on a slight tilt, what I call a plus EV tilt.
The dealer got a three and I got soft 18, 16, and 20. I doubled the 18, stood on the rest. The dealer drew an 8 for 11 total. At that moment I felt dizzy, the ground literally started moving under my feet. Next card should be a ten, classic.
Luckily they dealt a deuce before the ten and the dealer busted. I won 20k, the deck quickly went bad and I got off with just a scare.
These stakes don’t impress anyone in the gambling industry. There are both degenerate gamblers who bet way more and advantage players operating at higher levels.
In the book "Whale Hunt in the Desert", which Mitch recommended in the comments recently, there's a player classification system.
At the top of the food chain is the biggest and rarest whale who bets 250,000 per hand. There are only a handful of these players in the world. The second tier of whales play at 150k per hand and there are about 50 of them. The third tier is another hundred players betting 100k. Then come the high rollers at 5k, 2500, 1000 and there are thousands of those.
These classifications are arbitrary. Between the 100k whales and 5k high rollers there are smaller whales, each occupying their place in the hierarchy.
In online casinos the entry threshold is much lower. Each site classifies players differently. Once I became a VIP after losing a 10k deposit. Compared to real whales this is laughable, but for a small online casino it’s normal.
One of the most famous examples of advantage play at high stakes is Don Johnson betting 100k in blackjack. And he wasn’t even counting cards. Some host was probably rubbing his hands thinking he caught a big whale. But under the game conditions Johnson received 20% cashback on losses over 500k which allowed him to play with huge advantage. He won about 6 million at Tropicana, 5 million at Borgata and 4 million at Caesars.
Advantage players can’t always play the highest stakes. Even in positive expectation situations you have to watch your bankroll to avoid ruin risk.
In roulette my personal record is 1000 on a number and 2000 on a split. This is a good way to shake up variance when needed. Much better than 10k on a color. It’s generally hard to find a version online where you can bet a lot on a number. The best I’ve seen was 2k at William Hill.
Betting 1k is always stressful because you can easily lose 50k in a session. And even though with certain promos it’s plus EV mathematically, it’s minus EV for stress management.
In slots it’s even harder to bet big with plus EV. Once I bet 400 dollars in A Night Out slot. I was getting 200 dollar bonus on 200 deposit and bet it all at once to maximize EV.
Several times I bet 400 on Red Tiger progressive jackpot when it reached huge sizes and competition was insane. I needed to urgently increase bet volume per time unit, it was a calculated risk. At these stakes you can even win more than the jackpot size, but your balance disappears at breakneck speed.
Usually a hundred bets at a dollar is better than one bet at 100 dollars. But for advantage play the rules change and sometimes you have to risk more than you should.
By the way, there’s another caste of players making astronomical bets that blow your mind, worth mentioning. These are streamers and unfortunately not everyone understands these bets are part of a show where the performer risks nothing.
What was your biggest bet on a single hand?