Former San Diego mayor Maureen O’Connor gambled away $1-billion. To wager a billion dollars over the course of her nine-year gambling spree, she would have had to bet the equivalent of more than $300,000 a day, seven days a week.  She spent the last decade wagering more than a billion dollars at casinos across the U.S., eventually liquidating her savings, auctioning her belongings, selling off real estate, borrowing from friends and taking more than $2 million from a charity set up by her late husband.  

Her lawyers said that while she had made well over a billion dollars in bets at casinos in Las Vegas, Atlantic City and San Diego, her actual net losses were around $13 million. She won about $1 billion from 2000 to 2009, according to winnings that casinos reported to the Internal Revenue Service, but lost even more topping $13 million. A shining example of how the house always wins in the end. 

As the Matt Damon's character says in the film Rounders:  In "Confessions of a Winning Poker Player," Jack King said, "Few players recall big pots they have won, strange as it seems, but every player can remember with remarkable accuracy the outstanding tough beats of his career." It seems true to me, cause walking in here, I can hardly remember how I built my bankroll, but I can't stop thinking of how I lost it.

According to documents filed in court by her lawyers, she turned to gambling to deal with the death of her husband in 1994 and of other close friends and family members. She began to seek an outlet in gambling, her lawyer wrote. “The pattern fits the syndrome known as grief gambling.”  To keep fueling her gambling, she was forced to get rid of up to $50 million in assets — savings, belongings, and real estate — much of which had been bequeathed to her by her husband, Robert O. Peterson, who founded the popular Jack-in-the-Box burger chain. Sadly he was no relation to me but what I would have done with all that money!  

"Remember this: The house doesn't beat the player. It just gives him the opportunity to beat himself." -Nicholas (Nick the Greek) Dandalos