March 2016

If you’re here, that means you love online gambling at least as much as I do. There’s no two opinions about it within our not-too-small community – online gambling rocks! Going out to a physical casino can be very fun when you’ve got a nice company to come with you and a few hundred bucks you’d be perfectly willing and able to spend on gambling, but if those conditions aren’t met then you’ve got a bit of a problem. Going to the casino by yourself, without a good amount of cash, sucks. It feels like an incomplete experience, like you’re missing something that you were intended to have. That’s why online gambling is so great – you can have only a tenner in your credit card and, say, fifteen minutes of spare time after the kids are off to bed, and you can still have a very complete experience playing slots, bingo or placing bets on your favorite sports.

But online gambling can be a double edged sword. On one hand, there’s plenty of accounts of people who made it big by playing online casino. Just a few days ago, a woman from Scotland managed to win £2.5 million by playing an online slot. Just like the example above, the woman, who is a teacher and a single mom, was bored on Valentine’s Day and decided to play an online slot. This would’ve never happened if online gambling wasn’t a big thing. You can’t exactly just go to the nearest casino on Valentine’s day, abandoning a seven-year-old child alone so you can play slots, that kind of thing simply doesn’t happen, or if it does, the authorities should definitely be involved. And yet thanks to online casino this ordinary woman managed to become a millionaire. This isn’t even the only case, or, hell, not even the only case this year – last month, a man won the £2.2 million progressive jackpot for an online slot, breaking records and taking names.

The number of people who made it big (I’m not talking millions, just thousands) from online slots is gigantic. The online slot industry is one worth billions of dollars, so it’s really amazing to think that it’s capable of giving out so much money and still remain highly profitable. But that’s because not everybody wins. A few days ago, the news that the creator of NYPD Blue – an immensely popular police procedural which ran for 12 seasons – was facing bankruptcy after spending his fortune of 100 million dollars on gambling, including sports betting and online casino. David Milch had to sell off his mansions and estates and move in to live on a $40-per-week budget in order to curb his horrible gambling addiction. The very same institution which had changed the lives of so many people by making them millionaires brought an actual millionaire, and a very creative person, to ruin.

I suppose that the message I was trying to narrate with this article is that one shouldn’t be swayed by the messages of positivity overflowing the web. Online gambling is great as long as it’s done in moderation. Try to be more like the Scottish mom and less like David Milch. Striving for the jackpot is great, but if you feel like you’re way in over your head and may be headed towards an addiction, don’t forget to seek help while you still can.

If you search his name in Google Images you’ll see pictures of him partying with Usher, Alicia Keys, Paris Hilton and Ludacris… He’s also been associated with the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Britney Spears, Robert De Niro, Jamie Foxx, Kanye and Kim, Lindsay Lohan, Chris Brown, Busta Rhymes, to mention but a few. He founded a production company which financed one of the biggest movies of the past few years – The Wolf of Wall Street. His name is Low Taek Jho and he popped out of thin air in 2009.

What made the tabloids notice Jho Low, as he’s otherwise known, was that he was dropping crazy money in New York and Las Vegas clubs, surrounding himself with celebrities and buying and renting extravagantly expensive condos. He’s also known to be the owner of one of the most expensive art collections in the world containing a Picasso that he bought for the mind-blowing $141 million. As you can imagine a big spender like this one is a perfect fit to the Las Vegas high roller and party scene. If you too consider yourself to be a big spender but Vegas is too far away from where you’re residing, then I would suggest you also visit highstakesroulette.co.uk for all your high limit casino needs.

But, as sweat as all this sounds, nowadays it’s actually not only fun and parties for Jho Low. His extravagant lifestyle and close connections to the Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak led to him being entangled into the investigation of the Malaysia’s Government Investment Fund (1MDB). The fund is actually being investigated for financial fraud and money laundering simultaneously by the United States, Singapore, Hong King and Switzerland. Many of Low’s bank accounts have been frozen for the purposes of the investigation, as he’s reported to have been acting as a financial advisor to the Malaysian Prime Minister who also happens to be the head of the advisory board of the 1MDB. The investigations were actually motivated by the fact that close to $700 million dollars of the 1MDB money ended up into Razak’s private account while the organisation itself failed to pay $11 billion to its creditors.

In the midst of this scandal Jho Low claims that he has nothing to hide and that the allegations of his involvement in any type of criminal activities are false. It certainly doesn’t help, though, that the party boy businessman has started selling some of his high-valued assets fast. Among the latest sales are three precious artworks amounting to a total of $54 million – a Picasso, a Monet and a Basquiat. What will happen to the tabloid’s favourite party boy? We’ll stand by to see.