I bet my entire life savings on red at the roulette table and won

Those of us who have dreams of starting a business, owning a home or travelling the world do our best to scrimp and save along the way with hopes of making those dreams come true. 

But not everyone favours the gradual method of saving by putting away small amounts from their pay packet each month – such as one man from London who sold his house and many of his belongings and travelled to Las Vegas to become rich beyond his wildest dreams.

In 2004 Ashley Revell travelled to Sin City with £76,840 to gamble on the strip’s famed casinos – and he took the entire lot to the roulette table where he placed the bet of his life on red.

Thankfully, his risk at the Plaza Hotel & Casino, Las Vegas came in and he doubled his money to £153,680.

Since then Revell, who now lives in West Malling, Kent, has seen his life transformed by the win as his stroke of luck inspired other gamblers to take chances on big bets (while Simon Cowell even based a new game show on the winner).

Ashley Revell, from West Malling in Kent, travelled to Las Vegas in 2004 and gambled his life savings on red in roulette

Speaking to CNN following the big win, which was caught on camera by the film crew Ashley had brought to Las Vegas to make the Sky documentary Double or Nothing, he recalled the nerve-wracking moment he watched the ball to see where it landed.

‘I was just… pleading that I’d pick[ed] it and that it would come in red. Before I actually walked up to the wheel, I was thinking about putting it on black, and then suddenly the guy was spinning the ball around and all the Sky viewers said… they [had] voted that I should put it on red.

‘So suddenly I just put it all on red. What I was really worried about was that I’d lose and my parents would be upset and my family would, you know, all my friends would be upset.’ 

The gambler sold his house in London and travelled to Sin City, where he doubled the cash he’d walked into the Plaza Hotel Casino with

Ashley (pictured now) now runs a company which produces human readable QR codes

Ashley added his gamble was so monumental that he could have ended up returning home to London with ‘nothing more than the hired tuxedo I was wearing’. 

Following the win, Ashley set up his own poker business, Poker UTD, an online poker room which was based out of Gibraltar. However the company went bust in 2012.

Despite the collapse of his business enterprise, Ashley still had money left over from his sensational win, and used it to take a trip of a lifetime across Europe on a motorbike. 

During the trip, he met the woman who would later become his wife.

From 2014 until 2022, Ashley worked as a senior account manager for an IT services and network company, according to his LinkedIn profile. 

And if he wasn’t already lucky enough, Ashley struck again in 2018 when he helped to uncover a Bronze Age hoard which he had found near his home in Elham, Kent.

Ashley was out and about with the Medway History Finders metal detecting group scouring the land when he stumbled across the ingots, which are around 2,800 years old.

He told KentOnline: ‘I hadn’t found much all day, just the usual shotgun cartridges and bits of foil, then I had an interesting signal and dug up a piece of green metal.

‘I got fed-up with digging up this ‘scrap’ and started to walk back to a tent that had been set up where members were sitting around table taking a break.’

After Ashley placed what he thought was ‘scrap’ in the bin, he claimed the club chairman went to empty his pockets and saw the ingots – and instantly recognised their historical significance.

Ashley then led the group back to the place where he made the discovery, and his teammates went on to discover more items which date back to around 900 BC.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Ashley’s latest project is making ‘human-readable’ QR codes, which operate as QR codes normally would but also come with a word attached to them.

By using his company’s website, a person can type in the word attached to the QR code and be directed to the same place they would be if they scanned the code with the camera on their phone.

The company’s slogan reads: kingslot96 ‘Remember the impossible.’