According to the NYTimes headline, ex-Mayor of San Diego Maureen O’Connor Diego “confronts a gambling problem” after having put approximately $1billion in play over nine years. That and she stole $2 million, which is not in the hed.
It was claimed that she only lost a net $13 million.
The Times’ mathematicians opined that she would have had to gamble $300,000 a day for nine years.
Math is wrong here and odds don’t sound right. Article only mentions slots.
Gentlemen/ladies, start your engines.
And here I was thinking by the thread title - We have a mayor around here?
She would have had to be gambling nearly nonstop all day to reach those figures. Didn’t anyone notice?
I’m not an expert, but it’s my understanding that someone playing, say, high-stakes baccarat could easily blow through a couple million in-10-15 minutes at a table, and someone playing with those kind of stakes would obviously have access to high-stakes tables.
I’m going to rely on Wikipedia here:
So… $100 per credit x 100 lines x 15 credits/line= $150,000 per spin.
Not such a big deal then. She was clearly biding her time and playing it out slowly.
Hmm. I nominate her for an extensive tax audit.
Apparently, there is a $5000 slot machine at the Aria Casino in Las Vegas:
This would allow you to burn $300,000 in a matter of minutes. What I find astonishing is that this machine is accessible to the general public in an open space. One would imagine that the casino would at least provide a private suite to the high-roller and serve caviar with Armand de Brignac champagne.None of the numbers in that article make sense. She started with 40-50 million, lost 13 million and then went so broke she had to loot her husbands charity?
It sounds like she had a bunch of business deals that went south that were the primary cause of her going broke. The article makes it sound like she went broke gambling.
Yes, the article is about poor her and her addiction. But the numbers are wrong. I’ll work on it.
The article says she played video poker. Playing a $100 video poker machine at the very slow rate of 200 hands per hour means wagering $100,000 per hour. Losing at the rate of 1.3% (a reasonable figure) gives a $13 million loss for $1 billion wagered.
The numbers work just fine.
I should certainly hope not. Caviare should be served with vodka, and Champagne with strawberries. Caviare and Champagne served together is a revolting concept.
I’m not sure how the numbers don’t add up - they look fine to me.
If gambling had net losses of only $13 million, then it’s obvious that she lost a lot of money in other ways, but it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to recreate that. Let’s remember that the 40-50 million was before the gambling spree, back in the 90’s. So her assets got hit by the dot-com bubble and then housing bubble. That’ll cut you in half even if you’ve invested reasonably wisely… and we already know that she doesn’t manage money well. The sale of a hotel in 2009 for $7 million had to be a huge loss - just two years earlier, I’m sure it would have been worth two or three times that.
I used to live in San Diego and was there when she was mayor. It is absolutely amazing how many San Diego mayors have been involved in some kind of corruption. It’s like a little sunny Chicago.
When I multiply 100 x 200 I get 20,000. Are you saying that when playing a video poker machine one must play 5 coins at a time?
I would assume that the $1B came from an estimate of how much her average bet was at the time of her worst results and then prorated for 9 year period. It is a rare gambler who has any loyalty to a particular casino. San Diego has at least half a dozen and Las Vegas has hundreds. My guess is that Maureen did not keep records, and if she did, who would believe her. I don’t see how anyone else would know. My guess is that she lost most of the money in an even more embarrassing manner.
For the record, to gamble $1B over 9 years at 8 hours a day and 365 days a year one would have to average over $38,000 an hour (I did not consider the possibility that there were two leap years in there.)
Yes, five coins per play on video poker.
The casinos keep records; every coin in or coin out is accounted for by player tracking software. The players are happy to comply since they get back around 40% of their expected theoretical loss in the form of comps.