My wife had a friend of a friend who lost her house and her life savings through gambling. The woman and her husband were both gamblers, both of advanced age, and had been living on his meager pension when the collapse took place. They never recovered from it either financially nor in many other ways. They spent the last years of their lives begging family and friends for a place to stay. They became elderly couch-surfers, and eventually the woman's health problems forced her to go into a senior care facility. They didn't even get to spend their last days of life together. Sad.
:(
This post was edited by Randy D at July 4, 2018 2:26 PM MDT
And English Guy my dad told us kids about many years ago....he went on holiday to Lass Vagus and happened to win 1 million dollars on a one armed bandit.....He put it back and won it again......Chasing his luck he put that all back in as well ..... He never won again and because you are taxed on your winnings in America,he was left with a huge tax bill he could not pay ....:(
A co-worker spent $200 on the lottery when the jackpot was 1.5 billion dollars. He never said how much he won, I just know that soon after he fell off his roof and was injured and never returned to work.
The worst loss for someone? I found a winning lottery ticket that someone had dropped. It blew across my lawn on some windy day back a few years ago. 1990. (?) I was picking up a few bits of trash and noticed the ticket. I looked at it curiously, and noticed all 3 icons showed up. I took it to a nearby market and redeemed it. Wow! I won $2.
The millions of Americans who gambled that wasting their votes on Jill Stein, Bernie Sanders and Gary Johnson wouldn't result in Trump becoming president.
A friend of mine was working through the Gambler's Anonymous 12-step program and was making amends to the people who had been harmed by the addiction. The thing that triggered him to finally get help was that he and his wife had gotten paid in the same day- they're both business professionals, so I can surmise there was probably a minimum of $6,000 in their account, though there may have been as much as $10,000, I guess. In any case he hit the casino on on the way home from work and soon found he was way behind. Before he knew it, he had lost their mortgage payment. In a desperate attempt to recoup his losses, he stayed there gambling all night, eventually losing both their checks and anything in their checking/ savings accounts. I'm not sure what his total loses were over the lifetime of the addiction, but it was in the $50,000+ range, I think.
I don't personally ever gamble expecting to win. I treat it like a form of entertainment. I think the most I've ever lost is probably like $20-40, but that was a gradual trickle over many hours on nickle slots or something.
I was with someone who lost $9,000 in one night of a four night visit in Nassau. When we came home he was up $16,000. I'm not much of a gambler myself. I have a friend who is addicted to gambling. She started signing markers in the casinos and we didn't know it. She got herself into real trouble and this was the one and only time in my life I loaned someone money. I knew I would get it back and I did. But she didn't stop until she, while way too young to retire, accepted a downsizing offer of two years salary to retire. She had to do that to pay off the casinos. She never really recovered financially and she still slips off on weekend gambling excursions. So sad.
~ 
Randy D 