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Nick the Greek
Nick (real name Nicholas Andrea Dandolos), was born in 1893 in Rethymnon, Crete, and educated at the Greek Evangelical College in Smyrna. He was the son of a rug merchant and the godson of a wealthy ship owner.
When he was 18 years old, his grandfather sent him to America, giving him an allowance of $150 a week. In Chicago he met and fell in love with a girl, but they quarreled and Nick moved to Montreal. There he became friendly with a leading jockey of the day, Phil Musgrave; assisted by the jockey's advice and his own natural ability for working out odds, Nick won $500,000 in six months' betting on horse races.
Nick then went back to Chicago and promptly lost the entire amount playing card and dice games that were unfamiliar to him. But he was not at all deterred from continuing his chosen profession. He began to study these games assiduously and in a few years had become so well known as a freelance gambler that casino proprietors were offering him large salaries to work for them. He usually refused, but became an enormous attraction at the casinos nevertheless merely by playing - partly because he would seldom stop gambling even after losing (as he frequently had done) as much as $100,000 in a single session at the tables.
Nick the Greek followed one basic gambling principle: to give himself as near an even chance as possible, so that his skill and his insight into his opponents' character may be given a fair contest. Thus, he usually avoided games like roulette where he considered the house percentage to be too great. He enjoyed playing craps, though his real genius was for cards - faro and particularly stud poker, at which he had won, throughout his career, over $6,400,000. But whatever the game, he always drew crowds of people anxious to witness one of the huge side bets that made him famous. When playing a game like craps (which often has comparatively low house limits) he had been known to make side bets of $5000 and more.
Although Nick the Greek was a relentless, calculating gambler, he seemed to enjoy losing as much as winning. With him the gamble seemed to count more than the money; once away from the tables he treated his money as casually as the ash of his famous cigars. He had often carelessly left huge sums in his hat-bands or in suits sent to cleaners. It has been estimated that $500,000,000 passed through his hands, and on his own admission he had swung from the extremes of poverty to the extremes of wealth 73 times! Yet he always played on credit, paid debts punctually, and was scrupulously honest.
Naturally this unpredictable gambler with a degree in philosophy and a passion for Aristotle & Plato was the source of endless speculation and rumor. It is widely believed that he once won a city block in Los Angeles, that he challenged an arrogant opponent to draw one card for $550,000 (the other man backed down), that he played faro for 10 days and nights without sleep.
These stories may or may not be true. But one thing is certain: Nick the Greek had been gambling honestly for many years on an unprecedented scale, which shows that, given the necessary skill and capital, you don't have to cheat at gambling to make it pay.

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