It’s not exactly a secret that UFC president Dana White likes to play blackjack. He’s always been open about his love of gambling, much to the chagrin of some fighters who that some of the riches he can afford to lose maybe should be theirs instead. With that being said, White has reeled it back on that talk in recent years, especially after WME-IMG purchased the UFC and he was given a cool 360 million dollars.
One person is still talking about it though – UFC color commentator Joe Rogan. On a recent edition of his podcast with guests Moshe Kasher and Natasha Leggero, the talk waded into what casinos do to people who win too much. Rogan used Dana White as an example, repeating stories that many UFC fans will remember:
“Dana White is a notorious gambler, but he’s won millions of dollars sometimes. I think he said he’s lost as much as one million dollars, and he’s won as much as seven million in a night.”
Kasher then asked if White had been banned because of his winning ways, and Rogan replied in the affirmative:
“Yes, he gets banned from them. Not only does he get banned, he pulls the UFC out of them. Like, they used to do the UFC at the Palms, and he killed the Palms, so they banned him and he was like ‘f–k you, we’re gonna move to the Hard Rock’, or wherever they moved next. But yeah, they banned him from a bunch of casinos because he’s really good at blackjack.”
When asked why anyone who’s rich would take the chance to lose that much money, Rogan took a pretty unique angle on it – basically saying that White could be affected by chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease caused by brain trauma:
“Dana’s been hit in the head a lot. Notoriously impulsive, notoriously susceptible to addiction, whether it’s gambling addiction, alcohol addiction, it’s a big part of CTE. That’s brain damage, from getting hit in the head.”
…
“He did a lot of boxing when he was young, had his dome rattled a number of times.”
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