Video: Eight Great Moments in Gambling

Gambling can take many forms, and there have been many instances in history in which very brave or very foolish people have pushed their chips forward and said, “All in.”

For your viewing pleasure, here are a few fine examples caught on video. Strange, but we couldn’t find any of Napoleon’s military campaigns on YouTube. . . .

8. Evel Knievel jumps the fountain at Caesar’s Palace (1967)
The infamous stuntman’s most punishing crash, all caught in excruciatingly slow motion. Note the apparent loss of power as his bike launches off the ramp in this eerily silent video.

7. The Fonz jumps the shark on Happy Days (1977)
Though his character’s selachimorphic safety was never in question, Henry Winkler was unwittingly feeding the vocabulary of TV critics everywhere with this foolhardy stunt, from which the show never recovered. Today, “to jump the shark” means to introduce an absurd plot twist that spells the end of a show’s credibility; fortunately, Winkler’s own credibility was restored (at least in the eyes of BCBusiness Online) with his brilliant turn as Barry Zuckerkorn on Arrested Development.

6. Jean van de Velde heads to the beach and goes for a swim (1999)
Okay, so maybe this isn’t so much a gamble as a meltdown, but one could argue that maybe this would-be British Open champ should have laid up on his second shot instead of going for broke. That, or packed some galoshes in his bag that day.

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5. Chris Moneymaker makes “the bluff of the century” at the WSOP (2003)
Mind you, the century was only 3 years old at that point, but still: the oh-so-aptly named Moneymaker, then a relative unknown, truly makes a name for himself at the World Series of Poker against Sam Farha and his admittedly weak pair of nines. “Must have missed your flush” indeed.

4. IBM bets the farm on the System 360 (1964)
In what some consider one of the biggest business gambles of all time, IBM put $5 billion (equivalent to about $34 billion today) behind “one computer family for commercial, scientific, and communications applications” – a watershed moment in the personal computing market.

3. World War I: Germany makes its final assault (1918)
The Germans, running out of boy- and manpower, attempted a daring and desperate surge on the Western Front. Suffice to say, they lost.

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2. John McCain picks Sarah Palin as his running mate (2008)
It’s easy to say in hindsight that McCain made the wrong choice, since he lost the election. It was a divisive move that split the Republican base, but arguably this “self-described hockey mom” eked out the most votes that the GOP could have hoped for.

1. Obama lays down a cool trillion on the U.S. economy (2009)
History will be the judge of whether Obama’s ambitious stimulus package will have the desired effect, in what is essentially a colossal test case in Keynesian economics. But American voters will be the judge of Obama’s presidency long before that.