Harry Kakavas Billionaire gambler Harry Kakavas
was sick of letting the casino win. He couldn’t get his money back on the slots, so
he decided to try and get it back in court. So, does the house still win in the courtroom?
During his heyday, Kakavas was a very successful real estate agent. He made millions selling houses
on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia. The Gold Coast is as flashy as its name implies.
It’s home to the Australian film industry, and has some of the best beaches on the continent.
There are plenty of high profile clients there to sell expensive homes too, and the average
property value is 800,000 dollars. Kakavas was a real estate agent for 28 years and broke all
kinds of different sales records for the area. Kakavas’s other love, apart from real estate, was
gambling. Although, it wasn’t nearly as profitable as real estate. Over 14 months, Kakavas wagered
almost 1.5 billion dollars on the baccarat tables at Crown Casino in Melbourne. He bet 300,000 per
hand, and ended up losing more than 30 million. He lost everything he had. He even lost
things he didn’t have, and ended up owing millions to his lawyers, banks, and friends.
These friends thought they were giving him money to fund a real estate venture. In reality,
they were just funding his trips to the casino. Crown Casino isn’t exactly the most reputable
place to go and gamble. They’re currently involved in a big legal battle because they’ve been accused
of money laundering and lying to government regulators. Casinos don’t carry a reputation for
being the most honest businesses around, but Crown was so bad that Australia thought they had to step
in. The government described Crown Casino as "illegal, dishonest, unethical and exploitative.”
They’re still open, but under supervision. Self Ban
Kakavas knew that he had a serious problem early on in his gambling career. Back in 1994,
he got himself banned from The Crown casino. In Australia,
you can get the government to legally ban you from a casino. This means that they cannot let you keep
gambling at their casino or they could get into trouble. It seems as though Kakavas was making a
genuine effort to tackle his gambling addiction. Not only was it illegal for the casino to let
him in, it was even illegal for them to send him any sort of promotional material. And if
he did somehow gamble there, it was illegal for them to let him keep any of his winnings.
Vegas Kakavas got himself banned from gambling
in The Crown, and pretty much all other casinos in Australia. However, he caved and still wanted
to gamble. He could have tried putting on a fake mustache and sneaking into The Crown. But he was
a millionaire, so there’s no need to do that. He just got on a plane and flew out to Vegas, where
he was free to do all the gambling he wanted. Kakavas continued to frequent Vegas even after his
ban in Australia was lifted per his own request. Maybe he just liked Vegas? But while he was there,
he was spotted by someone connected to The Crown. Even though his gambling ban was gone, The Crown
had banned Kakavas themselves because they were worried he might cause trouble. The Crown didn’t
want Kakavas losing money in Vegas casinos. No, they wanted him to lose money in their casino. The
Crown lured Kakavas back to Australia with special benefits so that they could keep milking him.
Return to Melbourne It took a lot to get Kakavas to leave Vegas,
even though he was losing millions there. The Crown gave him all sorts of free stuff – free
luxury rooms, free food, free drinks, free limo rides, and even free private jet trips.
The Crown sent a plane to pick him up and fly him out to the casino. It was worth it for
them to lose money in the short term on all these freebies for their favorite customer.
They knew Kakavas would give it back and more. They even flew him out to the Philippines and
back for a vacation. He didn’t even gamble there! On a few occasions, they did something no casino
ever does – they just gave him free money. Sometimes, when Kakavas got on the plane,
a cardboard box with 50,000 dollars inside sat in his seat. That’s how confident the Crown
was that they’d get all this money back and more. In total, The Crown gave him 10 million
dollars worth of cash and accommodations. Everything went according to plan. Kakavas
lost and he lost hard. One night, he lost 2.3 million dollars in just 28
minutes. That’s a rough half an hour! He continued to lose until he was flat broke.
Kakavas wasn’t going down without a fight. His love-hate relationship with The Crown officially
tipped all the way to the hate side, and he sued them. He sued them on the basis that they knew
he was a gambling addict, yet they set out to exploit his weakness deliberately. The casino,
he claimed in court, had acted out of malice. They may not have broken any specific laws,
but his lawyers argued that The Crown had acted in such bad faith that the
court would just have to side with Kakavas. They thought they could make legal history.
However, the judge didn’t see things the same way. Justice David Harper ruled that there was
no law that allowed gamblers to recoup their losses in court. Until some new law is passed,
casinos are free to do as they please, and if you’re a gambling addict, that’s your
problem. While it may seem as though The Crown deserves to lose here, it’s important to keep in
mind the broader legal issue at hand. What would happen if Kakavas had won? Could anyone get their
money back from a casino just by claiming to be a gambling addict? How could you prove that you were
a gambling addict? Precedent
The strange court case was not entirely without precedent. In 1999, a poker addict named Chris
Reynolds tried to sue a casino. Reynolds had repeatedly asked the casino to deny his credit.
They did, but they also let him cash checks and lose hundreds of thousands of dollars..
Reynolds begged the club to ban him and not let him gamble there anymore. The casino won in this
case as well, even though the manager had made a verbal agreement with Reynolds to not allow him
to gamble there anymore. The casino was found to have no liability. What they had done was
perhaps cruel, but not illegal. The judge ruled that Reynolds had lost his money as a result of
deliberate and voluntary acts. There was just no way for gamblers to get their money back.
Unless they continued to gamble and won, that is. But that mindset is kind of the whole problem.
A similar case happened in 2007, when a gambler by the name of Forough sued Sydney’s Star City
Casino. They allowed him to break his self-ban on 65 separate occasions, and he lost 600,000 dollars
at the casino. The judge, once again, ruled that he had only himself to blame and that the casino
wasn’t liable for his lost money. Big Bad Crown
There’s a reason this whole story happened in Australia. Australians are among the
biggest gamblers in the world. During 2017 and 2018, Australians lost a total of 25
billion dollars gambling. That’s 1,292 dollars on gambling per person. In case you’re wondering,
the other biggest gambling countries are Singapore, Ireland, Canada, and Finland.
80 percent of Australia’s population gambles. Gambling is such a big problem in Australia
that the government put together a task force to see if anything could be done about it called
The Productivity Commission, and they proposed a few ways the government could step in. A study on
casino losses showed that the most dangerous thing in a casino, at least in Australia,
are the slot machines, which are what Australians call “pokies.” 70% of so-called problem gamblers
lose their money on slot machines. So one of the commission’s recommendations was to
allow gamblers to set a limit on their spending for a given session. Once they hit the limit,
it would bar them from the machines. There is currently a limit on how
much you can lose at any given machine per hour. Right now it’s 1,200 dollars,
but the commission proposed that this should be lowered to 120 dollars. As you can imagine, the
casinos didn’t think that this was a good idea. It would be a huge blow to their profits, so much so
that they said they would have to downsize the whole operation to accommodate the change.
Other countries have created similar sorts of laws in order to curb gambling. So this isn’t a
purely hypothetical discussion. In Canada, one of the other big gambling countries,
casinos use a software called iCare. It may seem preposterous to imagine casinos
caring, especially after everything in this video. Canada’s iCare system identifies gambling addicts.
They claim that it can do so very effectively and is 97 percent accurate. It's nice that they’re
identifying them, but they don’t really do anything about it. Generally speaking,
gambling addicts are not banned. They are, however, offered counseling. That’s how the
system works in theory, anyway. In practice, it’s difficult to enforce. Some people in Australia
would like to see something similar implemented in their own casinos, only the system would
then ban the people it identifies as addicts. It’s unlikely that Australia will ever enact
such harsh reforms on casinos. Casinos are simply too big of a revenue source for the government.
About 10 percent of state revenue comes from gambling. So restrictions on how much
you can bet wouldn’t just hurt the casinos, it would hurt the government they pay taxes too.
Full Circle After losing the case,
Kakavas went back to the more profitable world of real estate. He renewed his real estate license
and got back to the thing that actually made him money. His battle with The Crown
caused him to take seven years off from real estate so he could focus on his legal
battle that went nowhere. His lawyers were, supposedly, so sure that they would win,
they worked for free, planning to cash in on the massive payout from The Crown.
Kakavas branched out from just selling beachfront property to selling all sorts of houses.
Maybe he realized it was time to switch up his life a bit. He seems to have gotten over
the lawsuit and his gambling issues. He’s happy to be free from the distractions,
and has since accepted the court’s decision. It took him a long time for Kakavas to escape
gambling. But better late than never. Click to watch one of these next videos!
And let us know in the comment section what’s the most you’ve ever won, OR lost in a casino!