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McCain and Obama: two gamblers betting on the White House

By Matt | July 5, 2008

In Barack Obama and John McCain, the USA will choose between two committed gamblers when it has its presidential election later this year.

A Time magazine article has highlighted the passion both men have for gambling – poker for Democratic senator and election favourite Barack Obama, and craps for his Republican rival John McCain.

According to Time, McCain loves to bet high stakes on dice games – a habit he picked up in the US Navy, when he “came of age on shore leave in the casinos of Monte Carlo”. He never bets for financial gain, apparently, but enjoys betting $1,000 a time at the craps table for the thrill of the game and the camaraderie that goes with it.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, is a cunning poker player – preferring five-card stud to Texas Hold’Em, like many poker connoisseurs. His political career has become characterised by his late-night poker games with fellow senators in the Illinois legislature, where he “cadged cigarettes and drank a beer, kept up with the boys’-night-out banter and roared at the off-color stories.”

It is interesting that a fondness for gambling is common among US presidents, given the puritan attitude of the country to betting in general. Andrew Jackson owned racehorses and fighting cocks – this was back in the early nineteenth century – while Richard “Tricky Dicky” Nixon funded his presidential campaign with poker winnings and Teddy Roosevelt noted that professional gamblers “usually made good soldiers”.

No matter which of Obama and McCain becomes the next president of the United States, their love of gambling will gladden the hearts of many American punters. With gambling illegal everywhere but Nevada and New Jersey – hence the kid-in-a-sweetshop surfeits in Las Vegas and Atlantic City – and sports bettors elsewhere forced to bet with crooks and con-men, having a high-roller in the White House can only be good for US gambling.

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