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17th January 2024
11:54am GMT
A man who gambled his life savings on a single spin of a roulette wheel managed to land another incredible bit of luck a few years later.
Ashley Revell, from London, made headlines in 2004 when he sold everything from his clothes to his home to place a £76,840 ($135,300) bet all on red at the Plaza Hotel & Casino, Las Vegas.
His once-in-a-lifetime punt was showcased in the Sky One reality show Double or Nothing.
Viewers of the show could help Revell decide which colour to place the money on, and in the end he went for red.
“It was just... pleading that I'd pick[ed] it and that it would come in red," he told CNN at the time.
“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.”
The incredible gamble paid off, and in the blink of an eye the Londoner had doubled his money to £153,680 ($270,600).
Revell spent some of the cash on a cross-Europe motorbike road-trip where he ended up meeting his future wife.
But his luck wasn't finished there.
In 2018, he managed to uncover a hoard of Bronze Age items while out with his metal detector near his home in Elham, Kent.
Revell and members of the Medway History Finders metal detecting group discovered ingot fragments and axe heads dating back as far as 800BC.
Speaking to Kent Online after the discovery, he said: “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 the table taking a break.
"I got back to the tent and emptied my pockets into the 'scrap' bin, sat down and had a cup of tea.
"Then the club chairman went to empty his pockets into the bin and suddenly reached in and held up a piece of the 'scrap' I had put in there and said 'who put this in here?'"
Someone really needs to turn his life into a film...
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