Who hasn’t dreamt about being a high roller or, better yet, a whale and live the luxurious life of betting and winning big? I know I have and that’s why I decided to share my high roller experience with you. Not that I am or ever was one, but I got the opportunity to spend 24 hours with one. How come? That’s a really interesting story and perhaps I will share it with you, but some other time. As I was saying, I spent 24 hours with one of the biggest bettors in the UK and not only, who I will not name for obvious reasons. We’ll just call him mister X. He mainly plays in land-based locations, but online too, because he is good at picking the right high stakes casino. He is 40-ish, but despite his hectic life, he doesn’t look older than 30. So, here is what a day of mister X looks like.
Mister X gets up in the afternoon, after having went to bed in the early hours of the dawn, probably still hyped from the previous night’s events and with slightly hungover. His first meal will be a plate of fruit, freshly squeezed juice and a lot of coffee. Oh, and two aspirins on the side. Yes, most high rollers keep a healthy diet and work out whenever time permits it. Our mister X has a special room from working out, where he has a treadmill and some other fitness equipment. The room has one wall all windows, so he has the most amazing view while he trains. But this is not what you are interested in, so let’s jump to the gambling part.
He makes a call and says to me ‘let’s do this’. We go downstairs and there is this huge limousine baring the name of the casino we would go to waiting for us. In the limo, we have few glasses of champagne – because that is part of the high roller’s life, and make small talk, when all of a sudden he becomes very serious and says that he needs a minute to free his mind before we arrive. We reached the casino and he was instantly greeted by a very beautiful and refined young woman – the hostess, no doubt and the head manager of the casino. They know him all too well and they have the utmost respect for him. Not for the money he plays, for the way he does it. He is classy, quiet, good looking and always knows how to talk to people. After a couple of minutes, we are taken to a private gaming room, with three tables – blackjack, roulette and baccarat. The tables were closed, they open them and change the table limits sign, raising the stakes for him. The room is his, no one else can enter or play at any of the three tables. He kindly greets the dealers and sits at the blackjack table first. He is allowed a maximum of 5,000 per hand, times 9 hands, he bets a total of 45,000 per deal, not counting doubles or splits. He gets a good run and after an hour or so, he is already up 300,000. Yes, just like that. He doesn’t count cards, he doesn’t make mistakes and he doesn’t talk all that much. Once the second shoe is done and t’s shuffle time, he moves over to the roulette, to have a go at it.
He doesn’t sit, he prefers to stand. He plays number completes, which total around 80,000 per spin. He gets a few hits, but nothing big, so we move to the baccarat table, which we didn’t leave for 6 hours straight. He first had a good run, then a bad one, then they raised the limit for him once more. He was betting big and I could see that his calmness was slowly, but surely dissipating. Nevertheless, he keeps his cool and manages to turn things around, to the point that he already had a one million marker in front of him, with many other chips and cards. My high roller turned into a whale in front of my eyes, but he remained the same modest, cool and calm person. He made a little over a million for around 10 hours, they he said to me ‘let’s have a night cap and call it a day!’. Amazing person. I always had a different impression of what high rollers are like, but mister X sure proved me wrong.