Dana Frederick White Jr is likely the most influential person in the world of combat sports, a title he has carried for almost two decades. Born in Manchester, Connecticut, White was a boxercise instructor in Boston in his twenties before getting in trouble with notorious crime boss Whitey Bulger. An incident that caused him to move to Las Vegas, where he quickly entered the MMA world, working as a manager for future Hall of Famers Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell. In 2001, real money casino moguls, the Fertitta brothers, Lorenzo and Frank, the owners of Stations Casino, decided to acquire the UFC from Bob Meyrowitz’s Semaphore Entertainment Group on the advice of White. The brother duo then installed White as the company’s president. Since that moment, his profile has grown yearly. Some of it is due to his hard-fisted way of leading the UFC. Yet, his various eccentricities have also played a role in the president of the top MMA organization gaining mainstream prominence.
Since Dana White has been living in Sin City for over two decades, it should not surprise anyone that he loves to hit many of the town’s hottest gambling spots. Like most veteran players, his gaming product of choice is twenty-one action. White is such a massive fan of the world’s most established card game that even videos exist of him playing online blackjack from hotel rooms, betting big over the internet. That said, he prefers to wager on casino floors, where operators cater to his every need, boasting a reputation for dropping and winning millions in the process.
When it comes to blackjack, a nugget of info many lay people don’t know is that it is easier to win if someone is a high-roller than a casual player. That is so because gamblers who bet big have extra leeway in what rules get implemented at their table. They can negotiate the blackjack terms in play, something that White does at every venue he visits that would accept his high-roller action.
So he gets perks that other players don’t. There may be no casino bonus in Dana White’s cards when he steps foot in a Vegas gaming joint, but in a sense, he gets one by being able to push his weight around and level the playing field between himself and his chosen operator. Below, we get into how he does this and the type of strategy he implements when card gambling.
Unlike Ben Affleck, Dana White swears he does not count cards.
Dana White’s Approach to Blackjack
As touched upon, because he can make rule tweaks, changing when he can split, surrender, and more, all that affects blackjack’s house edge. So, Dana White does not face the usual one of 2% when sitting to enjoy twenty-one entertainment at a Vegas establishment.
Moreover, he chooses to incorporate the standard blackjack strategy system chart. However, he has frequently mentioned that depending on what his gut tells him, he breaks patterns, as he believes that nothing should get set in stone and that sometimes, you need to rely on a feeling. Thus, he often chooses to hit on hands where his total is sixteen or seventeen.
White swears that he does not count cards. He claims he is no Ben Affleck, another celebrity famous for getting banned from casinos for winning big. Though, Affleck is an admitted card counter.
On the other hand, White states that he does not keep a mental tally of the cards dealt. Instead, the secret to his long-term success is that he has set win limits in mind when playing. First, when he rolls up to a table, he’ll wager as high as they let him. For instance, he’ll bet two hands at $75,000 each, and if he wins both, bagging over $150,000, he’ll simply walk away. It does not matter that he has spent only a minute playing. When clear-headed and after winning a decent amount, White usually does not hesitate to walk away. As he proclaims, he’s there to win. It is irrelevant if his session lasted three hours or three minutes. Once he snags a respectable sum, he often selects to step aside to enjoy his winnings. “I’m not there to dick around. I’m there to win.” White has emphatically professed.
Still, sometimes, he cannot help himself and likes to go for broke. According to a Las Vegas Review-Journal interview, White enjoys the weird mental state that gambling causes him to experience, the rush of winning. In the same conversation, he added that there are multiple aspects to being a good gambler, but sometimes, it is all about luck rather than knowing how to play the game.
UFC commentator, Joe Rogan, has speculated on his podcast, the Joe Rogan Experience, that White may suffer from CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy). That is a form of brain trauma he may have incurred from his boxing days. And that this may fuel his impulsive behavior at moments, ergo making him double down on sizeable wagers out of nowhere. CTE has gotten connected to various addictions, including gambling.
Due to him beating the Palms casino several times, the venue gave White a blackjack championship belt.
Dana White’s Massive Casino Wins
Rumors are that Dana White is one of Vegas blackjack kings, bagging up to seven million dollars in one night. Casinos that have banned the UFC president from playing on their floors include the Palms (twice), the Wynn, and the Mirage. These venues don’t refuse White entry. They only don’t want him betting at their card tables.
During a Bar Stool Sports segment, White revealed that he entered his first blackjack tournament in July 2010. Shortly after, he got invited to a $250,000 Rio competition, which he eventually won. White also mentioned that before the Maloof brothers sold their majority share of the Palms casino to TPG Capital and Leonard Green & Partners LP, he won $1.6 million at the property. The venue even gave him a gaudy blackjack championship belt for taking them to the cleaners.
Apparently, White is not a fan of betting systems (we assume the Martingale), and he prefers playing on instinct. Aside from blackjack, he also has a track record of wagering on sports. He once told ESPN Sports Betting that he is a degenerate and always gambles on every sport that interests him, admitting that he lost $1 million on the Jermain Taylor – Kelly Pavlik fight in 2007. He was 100% certain that Taylor would win as the odds-on favorite. Instead, he got TKO’d by The Ghost in round seven.
On several occasions, White has reiterated that his favorite Las Vegas spot to visit is Caesars Palace and that anyone who is a blackjack fan would be crazy not to play there.
Is Dana White a Winning Player?
Online casino USA sites are now all the rage, and it seems like Dana White may need to gravitate towards using them more, as he recently said in a GQ segment that only three Vegas casinos would let him play on their floors. These are the Bellagio, Caesars Palace, and the Venetian.
Though no one knows White’s actual blackjack record, he has a rep for being one of Vegas’ biggest tippers when he wins big.
However, the problem with online casino games for real money, even VIP live dealer ones, is that hand limits hover around the $ 10,000 mark. That is incomparable to the maximum bets possible at high-end brick-and-mortar properties like those discussed above. So, no gambling site can realistically serve the type of high-roller activity White craves. But, in 2013, at the launch of internet betting in the Garden State, UFC’s head-honcho bet over $220,000 at Ultimate Casino, an interactive gaming platform, and then posted a tweet stating that he had won $33,000.
Nevertheless, no one knows how much he lost. While Dana White likes to brag that he is continuously winning staggering amounts, many Las Vegas locals believe that he has actually lost more money than he has won. Joe Rogan, UFC’s most famous employee, once mentioned on his podcast that White told him he dropped a million in a single night of gambling. Many industry analysts believe that at the end of the day, White is actually in the red, and the only reason venues ban him from playing is that they cannot afford his level of betting action. If he manages to win, they cannot take the financial hit.
Whatever the case is, regarding his win-to-loss ratio, what is certain is that White has an impeccable reputation for being a super-generous tipper. During one two-month hot streak in 2012, UFC’s leader gave away more than $100,000 to dealers at the Palms.
