Question of the Day - 08 August 2005

Last month we ran a couple of QoDs dealing with gaming-associated records (July 20th -- biggest slot jackpot ever won; July 26th -- world's largest casino). Since this evidently hasn't satisfied the appetite for record-breakers, however, we decided to try and track down a few more.

It hasn't been easy. A search of the Guinness Book of World Records for the past two years, for example, yielded only one gambling-related record (ticket sales for a lottery, with the UK's National Lottery having reached $81 billion worth by January '04). It seems that gambling accomplishments are more the stuff of legend and rumor than hard fact and it's tough pinning down definitive statistics. But to the best of our knowledge, the following are all accurate and true.

• Longest roll of the dice: The greatest verified roll of all time was by Hawaiian Stanley "Golden Arm" Fujitake, now deceased, who on May 28, 1989, rolled the dice for three hours and six minutes, and 118 rolls before sevening out at the California Hotel & Casino in downtown Las Vegas. In honor of its most famous crapshooter, the Cal created the "Golden Arm" recognition program, which inducts players who hold the dice in excess of an hour into the "Golden Arm Wall of Fame," adding their name to a plaque that now includes 175 names. The Cal hosts them annually at a special reunion dinner.(Source: Boyd Gaming)

• Longest continuous poker game in history: To the best of our knowledge, at eight years, five months and three days, this record is still held by the game that ran continually and around the clock from 1881 to 1889 at the Bird Cage Theatre in Tombstone, Ariz. The table seated seven with a minimum buy-in of $1,000, and over the years the players who sat down are said to have included Adolph Busch, George Randolph Hearst, Diamond Jim Brady, Bat Masterson, and Doc Holliday, not to mention a host of other famous gamblers of the Old West. Ten million dollars exchanged hands over that eight-year period and the house took 10%. The game finally came to an end when the mines closed in 1889 and the theater was boarded up, leaving the poker table as it stood with cards, chips, and whiskey bottles still in place. (Source: Bird Cage Theatre)

• Biggest lottery win: In 2002, Andrew "Jack" Whittaker Jr., a building contractor from Scott Depot, West Virginia, got a Christmas present to remember when his numbers came up on the Christmas-night Powerball drawing, making him the lucky winner of the biggest undivided international lottery jackpot in history. Whittaker chose to take the $314.9 million prize as a single cash payment, netting a total of $111.7 million after federal and state taxes. (Source: CNN)

• Biggest single bet on the Super Bowl: The largest bet ever placed on a Super Bowl game was $4.8 million at The Mirage in Las Vegas. The wager was on the St. Louis Rams to win outright against the Patriots in Super Bowl XXXVI. The bettor lost, as the Patriots won 20-17 on a last-second field goal. (Source: Today's News, LVA Jan. 20, 2004)

• Biggest winning bet on the Super Bowl: Bob Stupak, former owner of Vegas World and founder of the Stratosphere Tower, is generally given credit for making the biggest winning bet in Super Bowl history (at least of those publicly disclosed) when he bet $1 million on Cincinnati in the 1989 Super Bowl against San Francisco. The 49ers won, but the Bengals covered the seven-point spread and Stupak pocketed a cool mil. Legendary gambler and sports book operator Gene Maday, who ran a tiny sports book called Little Caesars, booked the bet. Little Caesars was later razed to make room for the Harley Davidson Café and developments just south. (Source: No Limit -- The Rise and Fall of Bob Stupak and Las Vegas' Stratosphere Tower.)

N.J. Woman Sets New Craps Record: Move over, Stanley "Golden Arm" Fujitake, there's a new champ at the craps table. Saturday night, Pat DeMauro made a $100 buy-in at a Borgata craps table, in Atlantic City. Four hours, 18 minutes, and 154 rolls later, she finally relinquished the dice, having set a new dice-shooting record. A novice player, DeMauro told a reporter, "I was learning the game as I went along." Borgata execs rewarded her victory with Dom Perignon, dinner, and a comped suite. How much did DeMauro win? "It was a good night," she said.