The 2008 movie 21 is a fictionalized tale of college students who use math to devise a formula to win in blackjack. She never revealed how much she won, but she bought in for $10, and even the most conservative of betting strategies would have returned 50 times that amount. Her friend played briefly, and then Demauro took the dice in her hands. In 2009, grandmother Patricia Demauro approached a craps table at the Borgata in Atlantic City for only the second time in her life. Then again, you could just pick up the dice, throw them randomly for four hours, and win big anyway. It’s a fast-paced game with many betting options, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can drop money fast. Cynthia says she’d give all her winnings back if she could only walk again or get her sister back.Ĭraps looks mighty intimidating to non-players. The drunk driver, Clark Morse, received a minimum of 28 years in prison for his crime.

Instead of traveling the world with her new husband, she found herself confined to a wheelchair, unable to even feed herself or comb her own hair. The accident killed her sister and paralyzed Cynthia from the chest down. Seven weeks after that, she’d never walk again.Ī drunk driver with 16 prior arrests slammed into Cynthia’s Camaro while it sat at a stoplight.

She married her boyfriend Terry Brennan two weeks later. On her ninth pull, she won $34,959,458.56-at the time the largest Megabucks jackpot in history.

On January 26, 2000, while celebrating her future mother-in-law’s birthday, Jay took a shot at the Megabucks slot machine, a state-wide lottery jackpot that had rolled over for quite a while. Photo credit: Carlos Avila Gonzalez/San Francisco ChronicleĬynthia Jay was a cocktail waitress at the Monte Carlo casino in Las Vegas.

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