While gambling at the Borgata Hotel Casino in Atlantic City, Harold McDowell, 85, who lived in Lakewood, New Jersey, won $1 million from just $5.00. His wife was shocked that he could have won such a large amount of money.
As it turned out, he happened to be playing alongside his wife while he was playing. The man was facing her from the back, but when he turned around, he announced that he had just won a million dollars. He wasn’t able to convince his wife at first, but once she saw for herself what he was saying and the realisation hit her, she was overjoyed.
In the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday, McDowell bet $5 when he chose to play Three Card Poker with a 6-Card Bonus game. As the dealer flipped over the cards, he saw a royal straight flush of diamonds that stunned him when he saw it. There were over 20 million odds against this hand being dealt.
As far as casino stories go, this was an even sweeter victory since he found out a day before that his wife had been declared cancer-free. It was made clear to McDowell that the luck of the Irish must have been at play as she had gone through several surgeries and treatments for liver cancer, and that she was also dealing with colon cancer for years.
As stated by the Borgata Casino, McDowell had made a wager bet of $5.00 on the casino’s Three Card Poker with a 6 Card Bonus bet and won $1,000,000 when he hit a royal flush of diamonds with a six-card hand for the bet. At Borgata, this was the first time this kind of bet had hit at the table, and the odds of hitting a Bonus Royal Flush were confirmed by experts to be 1 in 20,348,320.