1. Poker Prop Bet Breast Implants Augmentation
2. Poker Prop Bet Breast Implants Before After

To win the bet, Zembic needed to keep them for 12 months. But he says he's come to like his surgically-augmented set so much, that 19 years later they remain firmly in place. “I got lazy, I was. One of the most famous weird wagers in prop-bet history occurred in 2016, when high-stakes poker player and sports bettor Brian Zembic accepted a wager to get breast implants and wear them for a year. This was another $100,000 wager, and Zembic not only won the bet but continued to wear them after collecting the payout.

Poker Prop Bet Breast Implants Augmentation

Creative, crazy, even dangerous proposition bets have long been part of poker. A few spring to mind.
Huck Seed once bet Phil Hellmuth $10,000 that he could float in the ocean for 24 hours without touching the bottom, though Seed forfeited the bet before making an attempt. Erick Lindgren won $340,000 from Gavin Smith, Phil Ivey, and others after he played 72 holes of golf in one day, shooting under 100 each round, in the 108-degree Vegas heat in June 2007. And this past summer, Ted Forrest won $2 million off Mike Matusow after managing to go from 188 lbs. to under 140 (138, to be exact) in the space of just two months. Forrest fasted the final 10 days straight to win that one.

1. Another friend of Huck’s drops by several times to show off the breast implants he is wearing to win a bet. Also, there’s a Vietnamese guy, but get this – he speaks Spanish.
2. Brian Zembic's breast implants may have been the result of a stupid bet, but he's grown to love them so much that he refuses to remove them. Mr Zembic, a gambler and magician who lives in Las.

Trumping them all, I suppose, is Brian Zembic, also a poker player though probably more of a blackjack/backgammon player. In the fall of 1996, Zembic won a $100K prop for receiving breast implants, the story of which was subsequently chronicled in Michael Konik’s 1999 anthology The Man With the $100,000 Breasts and Other Gambling Stories.

Poker Prop Bet Breast Implants Before After

However much some want to argue that poker is somehow not gambling -- that its significant skill component allows one to approach the game as a strictly intellectual and/or psychological competition -- it is, in fact, a game that involves chance and is therefore a gambling game. Even if it weren’t, poker’s frequently close proximity to all those other gambling games -- usually just a few steps away in the casino (or a click away online) -- would probably increase the likelihood for action-seeking poker players to seek further opportunities to gamble. Especially when they are encouraged by fellow, like-minded “degens” as they are sometimes described, usually with a semi-serious mix of reproach and wonder.
You probably recently heard about another such prop bet, one involving a couple of young poker players, Ashton “theASHMAN103” Griffin and Haseeb “INTERNETPOKERS” Qureshi. Both have emerged over recent years as part of the latest generation of tough, successful online players, with Griffin additionally enjoying some big live scores including winning the $25,000 High Roller Bounty Shootout event at NAPT Venetian in February 2010.
Like Griffin, Qureshi has been involved in some of the highest-stakes online games, including being an early combatant of Viktor “Isildur1” Blom last year. His well-considered thoughts about those battles and their significance were shared by Qureshi on his CardRunners blog last fall (alluded to here).
Here the two roommates bet whether the 22-year-old Griffin, formerly a college wrestler and by most accounts well-conditioned athlete, could run 70 miles on a treadmill within a 24-hour period. The bet incorporated various provisions, and ultimately went off with Griffin giving Qureshi 3-to-1 on a wager of $285,000, meaning that if Qureshi lost he’d owe Griffin $285K and if Griffin lost he’d owe Qureshi $855K. Griffin booked an additional $15K of action with others, meaning he was risking a total of $900K -- not to mention the physical trauma of running nearly three marathons in one day -- to win $300K.
As reported on many outlets earlier this week, Griffin incredibly succeeded in the task and won the bet. Meanwhile, his friend Qureshi appears to have been affected by much more than having lost a significant portion of his bankroll. Yesterday and today Qureshi published a lengthy two-part account of the bet on his blog: The Million Dollar Bet, Pt. 1 and Pt. 2.
It’s a harrowing read, one that should give a great deal of pause to those eager to celebrate Griffin’s accomplishment and/or the undeniably fascinating culture that seems to produce such rash, risky behavior. Qureshi is highly self-critical throughout, recognizing the absurdity of the situation of his having bet on his friend’s body to fail him physically -- perhaps even irreparably. The experience seems to have been unrelentingly hellish for Qureshi (who turns 21 this year), and he writes with the self-awareness and perspective that belies his young age (and which he appears to have been lacking when he agreed to the prop).
Near the conclusion Qureshi speculates about “the world of poker players” in which he has lived for a short time, wondering if perhaps there is something “fundamentally unhealthy” present there of which all should be wary. It’s not a new observation he is making. But perhaps it is being made in a new way here -- and from a different perspective -- and thus might capture the notice of some it might not otherwise have gained.
People complain about the overuse of the term “sick” to describe risky maneuvers at the poker table or the awe-inspiring exploits of some of the games’ most celebrated “degens.” Qureshi’s account perhaps invites us to reconsider the term’s applicability to “the world of poker players,” including considering its possibly literal significance for some who inhabit it.

Labels: *the rumble, Ashton Griffin, Haseeb Qureshi, INTERNETPOKERS, prop bets

If places like Betfair have proved anything, it’s that you can bet on the outcome of basically any event these days.

If you don’t believe us, take a look at some of the most outrageous prop bets in gambling history.

5. Amarillo Slim’s bets

We said you could bet on anything “these days”, but legendary Texan gambler Amarillo Slim spent his whole life doing that way before Betfair and other online casinos existed.

Slim could fill this list all by himself, but for the sake of brevity let’s just give some of his highlights:

• Racing a horse: Slim bet that he could beat a racehorse in a hundred-yard dash, and got no shortage of takers. The only condition was that he would choose the track; he chose 50 yards one way and 50 yards back. By the time the horse had stopped, turned around, and got up to speed again, Slim was over the line.
• World championship ping-pong: Slim bet that he could beat a Taiwanese table tennis champion at his own game, so long as the Texan provided the paddles. He showed up with two Coca-Cola bottles instead of regular paddles; Slim had been practicing with these for months and deftly beat his opponent.
• A record golf drive: Could you drive a golf ball over a mile? Slim reckoned he could, and he did – because he hit the ball over a frozen lake and it slid far, far into the distance.

4. Jason Mercier’s bracelets

Just this year, poker champion Jason Mercier found himself on the right end of a huge 180/1 bet against fellow pro Vanessa Selbst. She had wagered that Mercier couldn’t win three World Series of Poker bracelets in 2016, putting up $1.8 million to Mercier’s $10,000.

Selbst came to almost immediately regret her decision when Mercier swiftly won a bracelet, followed it up with an oh-so-close second-place finish a few days later and then nabbed a second bracelet within a week.

Selbst had offered a $100,000 buyout before Mercier won his first, then she was forced to sell a lot of her side of the bet as Mercier kept doing well in events. Fortunately for her, Mercier had to settle for two bracelets in one summer and Selbst kept her $1.8 million.

3. Erick Lindgren’s golf

Golf and gambling go hand-in-hand, especially when it’s professional gamblers playing. Poker player Erick Lindgren got involved in a golf bet with several other pros, claiming he could:

• Play four rounds of golf from the pro tees at a 7,000-yard course.
• Shoot under 100 in each round.
• Walk the whole way, carrying his own clubs.

Anyone with a passing familiarity with golf knows that a 72-hole day is a long one, and $340,000 went on the line.

Unfortunately for Lindgren, his foes picked the day – one of the hottest in Las Vegas. Lindgren spent over 14 hours playing golf, lost more than 15 pounds and suffered from heatstroke and dehydration – but he did it, and pocketed a tidy sum.

2. Vegetarian Ivey

Playing on GSN’s High Stakes Poker, Phil Ivey got involved in a prop bet with fellow poker player Tom Dwan. The concept was simple – Ivey had to go vegetarian for a full calendar year, and there was a cool million dollars on the line.

“I was thinking about doing it for a while,” Ivey said while negotiating the bet. “So this is like an added incentive.”

Initially, Ivey wanted to bet $5 million. He’s probably glad he didn’t, as he bought out of the bet for a $150,000 fee just three weeks later.

1. Brian Zembic’s 38Cs

Perhaps the most famous and ridiculous bet of all time, especially for how relatively small the sum of money involved is, remains Brian Zembic’s “Breast Bet.”

Zembic – a male, if you hadn’t guessed – had to receive breast implants and keep them for a year. If he did, he’d win $100,000. A gambler to the core, Zembic sought out a surgeon after losing a lot of money on the stock market and got the operation free after beating the doctor in backgammon.

Zembic has the breasts to this day, 20 years later.