In our series of spreading fun stories from the world of gaming throughout the generations, we have reached our final episode. Stories about healthier casinos, auto shop slots, and Miss Atomic Energy are only a few of the crazy stories below. Enjoy your reading!

Super Granny DeMauro

In 2009, Patricia DeMauro, a grandmother from New Jersey, USA, left the Borgata Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City as the most fortunate player arguably in the casino’s history. Super Granny rolled the pair of dice 154 times at a craps table. Demauro was rolling the dice for 4 hours and 18 minutes without hitting a seven. The odds of doing this are an astonishing 1 in 1.56 trillion! This broke the world record for the longest roll and the most successive dice rolls without hitting a seven.

In the end, DeMauro never revealed how much money she won, but experts estimate that if she made good bets, the winnings were most likely in the millions of dollars. She actually spent the rest of her holiday weekend in Atlantic City and even returned to the same craps table two nights later, but only as a spectator. “The expectations were too high,” she said. “I wasn’t ready to be the shooter again.”

With those odds, even if she wagered a chocolate bar, it would probably be enough to buy a few toys, a small country or perhaps $1.56 trillion worth of chocolate bars. Wow!

Smoke-Free Casinos Get Fewer Calls for Ambulances

Even today, in the days of banned smoking, there are exceptions, but casino floors are one of the few public indoor places left in America where you can smoke a cigarette. This makes them excellent testing grounds for the safety of first and secondhand smoke inhalation. The University of California San Francisco did a study on the health impact of smoking bans in casinos and the results weren’t surprising: in Colorado, where it has been banned since 2008, ambulance calls to casinos dropped by an alarming 20%.

The First Slot Machine Wasn’t Even in a Casino

When mechanic Charles Fey invented the first slot machine in 1895, it wasn’t even played in a casino, and it was far from Las Vegas. Fey’s “Liberty Bell” machine was actually at his auto shop in San Francisco for customers to play while they waited for their cars to be fixed. It became so popular that casinos started buying them to give gamblers something to do when the table games were fully occupied. We all know how it worked out after that.

Vegas Casinos Capitalized on Atomic Bomb Testing in the 1950s

This may sound like a sick joke, but it is actually true. Starting in 1951, the U.S. Department of Energy began detonating more than one thousand test nukes just 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, a scary spectacle that “turned night into day” and left mushroom clouds visible from casinos in the burgeoning tourist hotspot.

Vegas being Vegas, the city turned the horror show into a business opportunity, promoting the detonation times via official Chamber of Commerce calendars touting Atomic Bomb Parties and offering special “atomic cocktails” at casino bars. There was even a “Miss Atomic Energy” beauty pageant at one casino, complete with little mushroom cloud outfits! Another example of the classic saying, “Only in America.”

Card Counting is Actually Legal

“Card counting” is a perfectly legal strategy in blackjack that involves keeping track of which cards have been dealt and which remain in the deck as you play. Movies like “Rain Man” and “21” make card counting seem like wizardry, but it’s actually fairly simple arithmetic. That hasn’t stopped casinos around the world from stopping card counting, however, especially if the player is less-than-subtle in their approach (actor Ben Affleck, for example, was banned from a casino in 2014 for this exact reason).

Besides asking players to leave or play another game, casinos also combat card counting by changing the rules slightly or shuffling the deck more often.

It is a fantastic skill to have, even if it may get you banned from most casinos these days.

Make Your Own Success Story!

At BitStarz, there are plenty of opportunities to create new success stories of this kind that includes yourself. Be sure to visit our lobby to find all the latest slots and other games – let’s make history!

If you for some reason missed our previous episodes, simply click here for episode 1 or episode 2.