Originally Posted by Zman179
This is my ultimate degenerate story and it is 100% true. Nothing is made up.
I used to know this horseplayer who was known as “The Flipper” who used to hang out at the Penn Station and John Street OTB’s. He got that nickname looking to flip quarters so that he could scrounge up enough money for a $2 bet. He completely lived for betting and would sleep on the Staten Island Ferry at night.
So this one day around 1989 I’m at John Street and he’s there. He starts with $10 and hit the early double at Aqueduct so he wasn’t flipping coins. On this one race he loves a 35/1 shot at Aqueduct and puts $40 to win on it…and it hits! I wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t shown me the old-style yellow hard paper ticket. So he plays the late double, hits it, and walks out with over $2000. He decides with his best friend that it’s time to hit the tables in Atlantic City. So they head to the bus terminal to take the Greyhound bus down there.
He gets to AC and he’s absolutely red hot. He plays craps and roulette and gets on a winning streak we can only hope to get one day. He’s down there for almost two weeks, rooms comped and everything, and gets the $2000 up to over $40,000!!! So now he decides, again with his best degenerate friend, it’s time to go to Vegas! They go to the AC Airport and book airline tickets straight to Vegas.
He’s in Vegas and stays hot. He does all of his gambling at one casino, again rooms comped and the whole nine yards, and gets the $40,000 to over $100,000! An unbelievable sum…but not for the Flipper. However now he starts to get cold, and he’s slowly losing the money back. He makes it last nearly two months until the money is all gone. He’s dead broke, but that’s not the end of the story.
The best friend tells me that one of the big bosses at the casino (I forget the name of the place) invites him into the office. He shows pity towards the Flipper and says to him, "We want to sincerely thank you for giving us your business. As a token of our appreciation, we would like you to go to our Armani boutique and choose two suits on the house. We also would like to give you a check for $2,500 and we would love to see you come back to our casino in the future and we wish you a safe flight home." Flight home? Noooo, not for the Flipper. He pawns the suits, cashes the check and goes to a completely different casino.
Unbelievably he gets red hot again! The money he got for the suits and check he was able to get it all the way up to $80,000! Unbelievable, a second chance to do right? Nope. The Flipper gets cold once more and the $80,000 disappears in a little more than two weeks. But this time there’s no charity, he’s dead broke and it’s time to come home. So almost four months after the hot streak started and finished, he’s back sleeping on the Staten Island Ferry and flipping for quarters at the OTB. Even the Flipper himself confirmed that that’s how everything went down. I couldn’t believe it.
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