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You don’t have to be a celebrity to make millions of dollars. In fact, you might prefer not to be. Celebrities get all the benefits that come with fame, but they also have to deal with all of the drawbacks. As great as it must be to be rich, there’s nothing pleasant about having a camera shoved into your face every time you open your front door, or having everything you say and do subjected to public scrutiny all the time. There are ways to get rich that don't involve appearing on the stage or screen and don't involve appearing in sporting arenas either. You could spend your time building up a hugely successful business, but that's a lot of time and effort. If you were skilled and lucky enough, though, you might be able to carve yourself out a living as one of the world's greatest gamblers. Those who can consider themselves as being among the best of the best all earn well into the millions. We would never seriously recommend that anyone becomes a professional gambler - unless, of course, you excel at cards. Most gambling is a game of chance, and chance can never be relied upon. You’ve probably have a look at an online slots website in the past, even if it was just out of curiosity. You might even have tried your hand at an online slots game or two just to find out how it all works. Some of our luckier readers will even have walked away from those online slots with more money than they arrived with! The majority of people who bet big on games of chance, however, lose as often as they win. The majority, however, isn’t everyone - as you’re about to find out. The World’s Biggest Progressive Slots Winner Multi-million dollar wins on online slots games happen extremely rarely - but they do happen. There’s one slots game in particular that has a reputation for turning ordinary people into millionaires, and that’s Mega Moolah - a game that’s mostly played in the UK. It was British soldier Jon Heywood who broke a world record while playing Mega Moolah. From a single £0.25 stake, Heywood anded a jackpot of £13.2m l. If we were to convert that into American dollars, it would come in at just over seventeen million. Needless to say, Jon never went back to the army. In fact, we don't think Jon has ever gone back to working anywhere - he doesn't need to! We're aware of rumors that larger slots wins have happened in Las Vegas, but with no evidence to back up these stories, we have to name Jon the winner in this category. The World’s Biggest Poker Winner While there’s some luck involved in winning at poker, the great players win through guile and strategy. Anyone can bluff successfully once or twice. Great poker players can do it all the way through a game, and know when you’re trying to do the same to them. One of the very best - and therefore the very richest - is Aaron Zang, China’s best-ever poker player and the winner of the single biggest poker prize ever paid out. Zang pocketed $23m from the Triton Million tournament in 2019. He was considered a surprise winner at the time, but perhaps his success should have been more foreseeable. The tournament had a one million dollar buy-in, so there were no amateurs sat at the tables! The World’s Best All-Round Gambler We needed to find a way to put Zeljko Ranogajec on this list, and we didn't know how else to include him. Considering all of the luck that goes into gambling, Ranogajec seems to strike it lucky a lot more than most. The Tasmanian-born Australian started playing cards when he was at university, and eventually dropped out of uni to focus on his gambling career. That was in the early 1980s. Blackjack was his chosen game, and he was believed to be a card counter. By 2011 he was banned from several casinos but also inducted into the Blackjack Hall of Fame. Nobody knows how much money he won from blackjack, but he won seven and a half million dollars on a single game of Keno in 1994. As of 2020, it's believed that he bets more than one billion dollars a year on horse racing. Cards, Keno, sports betting - it seems that no matter what Ranogajec bets his money on, it comes back to him in multiples. The World’s Best Sports Better This is a controversial choice, because our pick for the best sports bettor of all time is currently in jail for insider trading. It's Billy Walters, but to devotees of his methods on the internet, he's known simply as 'The Mathematician.' According to Walters, a mathematical formula can be applied to any sporting contest to calculate the likelihood of a result going one way or another, and that formula can be used to determine what does and doesn't make a good bet. It sounds like nonsense, but it's amassed Walters a fortune of more than two hundred million dollars. Historically he's confined himself to American sports - most of his biggest bets have been made on games of basketball and American football. One of the legends about him is that he didn't lose a single sports bet in four decades, although such a thing is impossible to prove. Honorable Mention - Archie Karas Everybody loves an underdog story. That’s why ‘Rocky’ is considered to be one of the best sports films of all time. If there’s such a thing as a ‘Rocky story’ in gambling, then it’s the story of Archie ‘The Greek’ Karas. Archie grew up in abject poverty in Greece, and bet as if he had nothing to lose - because he didn’t. His fearless poker style earned him enough money to run away to American when he was fifteen, where he became a notorious pool hustler. His path didn’t run smoothly though - he was down to the last fifty dollars in his wallet by 1992. Incredibly, Karas went from there to a fortune of seventeen million dollars in less than a year. By the end of that year, the biggest poker names in Vegas refused to play him because they were afraid of him. The story doesn’t end there either - he’s both lost and regained his fortune twice since then. Karas may not be the most successful gambler of all time because he never stays rich - but his story is one of the most incredible. That’s just five names from a field of dozens who have hit the big time over the years, and yet not one of them appears regularly in the newspapers. It’s just possible that the richest people in your home town or city aren’t in a sports arena or a boardroom - they’re in the nearest casino!

Two things will always be true of trading: you can never trust an election, and you can never trust a short term rise. Two of those things have combined together in the past few days, and we have a horrible feeling that they might have left a few speculators with more than a little egg on their faces. We’ll just cut straight to the chase: if you spent big on the British pound sterling in the aftermath of the UK General Election, you might want to leave it a few days before you check the performance of the currency. Sterling has always been a good indicator of the mood of business in the country, and never more so than in recent years. During times when it's looked like the United Kingdom will depart the European Union without agreeing to a deal on future trade relations, it's dipped low. In the build-up to the election, when it seemed that Jeremy Corbyn's socialist Labour Party might have an outside chance of victory, it fell even lower. Then the day of the election came, and Boris Johnson and his Conservative Party won the day. As they'd said multiple times on the campaign trail, they had a Brexit deal pre-agreed and ready to go. Given the size of the new Government's majority, nobody could stand in the way of the deal. The markets were happy, and the value of sterling soared to heights not seen in months against the dollar. For those paying attention, the writing had been on the wall about the election roughly an hour before the exit poll results were announced, and it was obvious the Conservatives had won. All day, the value of the pound had been ticking lower as there were rumors of a massive turnout of young people - young people being more likely to be Labour voters. Roughly two hours before the exit poll, the pound shot back up again. With about sixty minutes to go until the polls closed, someone in the City of London had clearly received a tip, because enormous wagers were placed on the Conservatives winning a majority. That news pushed the value of the pound even higher, and everything looked rosy. A week is a long time in politics and trading, though. That was then. This is now. As the Financial Times has confirmed, all signs are that the last week of the year is also likely to be sterling’s worst-performing week of the year. Not only will all the value you might have gained by buying sterling a week ago have disappeared, but your sterling investments may also end up being worth less than they were at the time you purchased them. Nobody saw that coming at the time, but then nobody saw the Conservatives attempting to back out of one of their key electoral pledges quite this quickly, either. The expected downward shift in the pound’s value has come because it now appears that the Conservative Party’s so-called ‘oven-ready Brexit’ may not actually be all that oven-ready after all. During campaigning, Boris Johnson gave the impression that he would look to pass the Brexit deal within a small number of weeks, and then iron out the finer points with the European Union shortly after that. Almost as soon as he was returned to power, though, he announced that negotiations on future arrangements with the EU couldn’t go on past the end of 2020, and therefore if matters weren’t finalized by the end of the transition period, the country would leave without a deal. This sent a shockwave through the market. The value of the pound has always held steady when a deal with the EU has been in sight, but it always plummets at the mere ghost of the idea of a No Deal Brexit. Almost all business commentators within the country agree that a No Deal Brexit would be disastrous for British jobs and British industry, and the impact on the value of the nation's currency would be catastrophic. By even suggesting that he might put the issue back on the table, Johnson will have caused a great deal of upset to a great deal of investors and traders. It’s to be assumed that Johnson doesn’t really want a No Deal Brexit, but for as long as it remains a possibility, sterling will remain volatile. In the past two weeks, it’s displayed the kind of volatility that would usually be associated with a particularly risky online slots game. While traders often do enjoy playing UK online slots for their own amusement, they don’t like to do it on business hours. If the chances of making a return on sterling continue to be no more reliable than the chances of making a return with a bet on an online slots website, they’ll likely shy away from it until the whole saga is over. For the investors who’ve been burned by the unexpected downturn this week, it might be a case of once bitten, twice shy. For those who were wise or lucky enough to avoid making a costly and speculative bet with sterling in the past few days, consider yourselves lucky. The lesson we can take from this is that until Britain has completely left the European Union, Brexit isn't over no matter what anyone says, or how much everyone insists there's nothing to worry about. Until every dot, cross, and signature has been applied on every single piece of paperwork, the specter of a No Deal Brexit will remain on the table, and therefore the specter of a massive drop in the value of sterling will stay on the table alongside it. If you must invest in currency, invest in the dollar, or invest in the Yen. Better still, don't invest in any currencies at all. Britain may not be the global superpower than it once was, but sterling is still a significant enough currency to have knock-on effects if it goes haywire. If Brexit goes badly, the value of the Euro will be dragged down with the value of sterling, and that will drag the value of the dollar down in turn. At the risk of understating the obvious, the next twelve months are going to be very interesting when it comes to sterling, the UK, and trade in general.