After taking his own life back, Louis Ruggiero is committed to helping others win their fight against gambling addiction.
After an exclusive interview with Ruggiero on Tuesday, CasinoBeats is using his own words to first tell the journey before we examine how the hit podcast “Nothing’s Off The Table” is now helping others suffering from the same disease.
In the Beginning
I only bet on FanDuel in the very beginning, and a guy reached out, and he said, “What are your favorite teams? What is the all-time mecca of events you wanna go to? The F1, the Super Bowl?” And then we started texting. He literally would message me and be like, “Hey, I saw you lost $10,000 this week. Here’s a $2,000 bonus.”
And I’m like, “OK, that’s not bad. It’s a 20% rebate.” That’s what my bookie would give me too. The first time I tried to seriously stop on October 22, 2022, I had a crazy run and won $400,000 in six days. Then I lost all of it, plus $100,000 more, five days later. So I was like, “This is why I can’t do this to myself anymore. I’m taking a pause.” I didn’t message anybody. I didn’t delete the app or anything. I’m gonna chill out for like a week, and he texted me, “Hey bro, is everything all good?”
And I was like, “LOL. Did you see that run?”
“Yeah. I can’t believe you gave it all back. Check your account. I just gave you a bonus.”
So I opened my account, and I had a $10,000 bonus in there. That brought me back in, and then, oddly enough, the way the gambling gods work, or the gambling demons work, I put in a $10,000 bet and won. There were multiple instances when I wanted to stop. A couple of months later, I texted my host, “Yo dude, I can’t take this anymore. This shit is starting to ruin my life. I need to take a break.” And they shut down my account completely.
So, what do I do? I walked across the bridge, and I started playing on DraftKings and a little bit on Caesars. Sometimes, the lines were better on Caesars, and I was a big dog better. I loved the value. If the line on DraftKings was +180, but over at Caesars it was +187, I played on Caesars more. Then I got a host at Caesars, and she was next level. Not predatory, but she was texting me every single day. I went to the Yankees-Guardians playoff game, front row behind first base. I went to Rangers playoff games in the suites. They took good care of me, but I think the story that sticks with me the most about the predatory stuff was Thanksgiving weekend 2024.
Contemplating Suicide
I was legitimately suicidal. I was ready to fucking put a bullet in my head. I was under so much pressure for so long. I was physically deteriorating. I was 100 pounds heavier than this. I couldn’t function at work, I couldn’t function at home, and I was having panic attacks. The only way I saw out of it was to go to the beach, swim out halfway, put a bullet in my head, and wash away. I thought that was gonna be the better solution for my family and me. Obviously, thank God I didn’t do that, but when we talk about the gravity of this addiction and this disease, I’m not the only one. My story is not unique.
Fortunately, I owed money to a friend, and he called, threatening prison and asking me just to be honest with him and my family. So, I get my sister and wife, and I tell everybody that Friday after Thanksgiving. That whole weekend, I didn’t bet because everyone around me was distraught. My wife, who at the time I had a 10-month-old baby with, was distraught because I gambled away our money to move into a new apartment.
I’m two years sober from drugs and alcohol at this point. But this is not what sobriety is supposed to feel like. I’m still lying and cheating. Then I get a text on December 2, saying “Hey hon, Happy Thanksgiving, hope you had a good weekend. I saw you didn’t bet. Is everything OK?”
And I said, “No, everything’s not OK. I don’t have any money left.”
And she said, “OK, just loaded you up a bonus.”
I had a $5,000 bonus. At that time, I was in the hole like a million dollars. So I was like, all right, I’m putting in a $5,000 four-leg anytime touchdown parlay on Monday Night Football to win like $360,000. I know I’m going to GA tomorrow and my Tuesday night meeting. I might as well try to scrape a little bit back before I get in there, right?
Responsible Gambling: A ‘100% PR Exercise’
Sportsbooks don’t care about reducing gambling harm. It’s a 100% PR exercise. I’ll make the comparison to a drug dealer. Drug dealers don’t make money off the guy who’s buying a bag of blow for his birthday once a year or on New Year’s Eve. The drug dealer makes money off the guy who’s a drug addict, who’s buying drugs, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, seven days a week. It’s the same thing with sportsbooks. They’ve just made it too easy, and they don’t listen. They don’t care.
I was 26 and walked into FanDuel in the Meadowlands, and I brought in a backpack with $65,000 in cash, and I put it all on Tom Brady and the Buccaneers versus the Chiefs. I won, thank God. I lost it all three days later, but that’s another story.
I remember thinking to myself, “How does a company not see any red flags when a 26-year-old brings in a backpack full of cash? How does he have this money? Where is this money coming from?”
Related: After Ohtani Scandal & Prison, Ex-Illegal Bookie Mathew Bowyer Bets Big on Redemption
Money is ‘All Relative’ Even When You Lose $10 Million
And, you know, about the money, right? I can say I lost $10 million in eight years. The money is all relative, and I say this on my podcast all the time: If I had access to $100 million, I would have lost $120 million.
I started off with $50 bets when I was a kid, and as I started, I had a very successful ticket business from 2016 until COVID. As I started making more money, my bets went from $500 to $5,000 to $10,000. At one point, I was playing $20,000-30,000 a game on five, six, or seven games a day. By the way, I was 24 years old. Going to the Wynn in Las Vegas, at that age, and getting a $200,000 marker.
It’s easy to reminisce about the good times in Vegas when you’re not broke, when you don’t owe anybody money, and your business is thriving, and you’re throwing around these big sums of cash, and you’re getting everything comped. But the addict’s mind doesn’t want to remember those times when you’re alone in your bathroom in Las Vegas, you lost all your money, and have nothing to cover your orders for tickets the following week or your $4,000 in rent. So, do I miss it? Absolutely not. Do I miss the glamorization of those fun gambling times? Yeah, of course.
I was so addicted to gambling because that had become my identity. That had become my persona. I was the gambler. I was the guy. I had the planes to Vegas. I had the bookie with a $500,000 a week credit limit. I was that guy in my group of friends, but I was also the guy that nobody knew, who hated himself, and was lying and cheating. Everything was smoke and mirrors, and it was built on a fucking house of cards.
My last bet was on December 2, 2024.
Nothing’s Off The Table
After Ruggiero stopped gambling, he worked to regain the trust of his family members. He also started working at the family restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. Fresco by Scotto has been in business for more than three decades, after his grandmother mortgaged her Brooklyn house to open it.
“I was showing up to work, and I was just like, ‘Man, I love this business, but there’s something more for me,'” he said. “And I felt just so passionate about the gambling stuff specifically, and my friend Kevin Lanning had a big podcast called ‘Rise Above‘ and he’d been pushing me to do a podcast.”
Around that time in January of 2025, about a month after he stopped gambling, Ruggiero completed a seven-day trauma-intensive workshop at Onsite.
“It’s not like rehab,” he said. “You don’t go there necessarily in a crisis moment, but there are no phones, no computers, and you’re in a group of six people and a therapist. It’s all psychoactive drama, inner-child, family-of-origin stuff.
“I told my story, and by the end of the week, one of my groups said you need to do a podcast, you need to write a book, or you need a Netflix documentary.”
With that, a podcast career was born.
Anthony Pompliano Provides Big Boost, Joins as Investor
Ruggerio started doing his early podcasts in a private dining room at Fresco by Scotto. A problem arose when the dining room was unavailable due to a private party. Ruggiero called his mother, Fox analyst Rosanna Scotto, and asked for a big favor.
“I called my mom and said we gotta cancel the party,” he said. “I got a big, big podcast today. She was like, ‘Yeah, you better find somewhere else to record.'”
Enter investor and entrepreneur Anthony Pompliano, who gained notoriety for his early support of Bitcoin.
“Long story short, my wife’s best friend works for Anthony, and I called her,” he said. “I said, ‘I know your boss, he’s got a studio, can I please come use it?'”
Ruggerio did and started doing more of his podcasts at Pompliano’s studio. They spoke a few times, and Ruggerio told him about his personal struggles with addiction.
“I don’t think he realized the severity of gambling and what it’s doing to our country right now,” Ruggerio said. “I think what made his eyes open a little bit was the prediction market stuff with this getting out of control.
“We can bet on Trump bombing Iran? What are we doing here? So this world is new to him, but he also understands more than anything how predatory it is now.”
Pompliano invested in the podcast, and they’re also discussing other opportunities to build off the platform to help other compulsive gamblers. Ruggiero said that treatment centers and sober-living facilities are among the potential projects.
Ruggiero Adamant About Not Taking Gambling Industry Money
As for the podcast, it’s grown by leaps and bounds since the first episodes began airing in May 2025. One early installment featured a fellow gambling addict and generated significant traction, spurring Ruggiero to open up more about his own story. The end result was his DM box being flooded.
“I realized there are so many people out there who are exactly like me,” he said. “People who have, by the way, who have been in my DMs, who have lost far more money than me, and people in my DMs who have lost far less money than me, but had the exact same feelings that I had (about suicide).”
Ruggiero also created his own Gamblers Anonymous Zoom meeting on Monday nights. The whole truth-telling experience has been liberating, but it also evokes a strange feeling in Ruggiero.
“This fires me up,” he said. “This feels almost as good as gambling does. The purpose and the identity that this gives me is a similar feeling to the purpose and identity that gambling gave me in two very sick convoluted ways.”
We asked Ruggiero about striking a balance between running a successful business and helping vulnerable individuals. The podcast succeeds because of his brutal honesty, but will he try to be more diplomatic in the future?
“It’ll never happen, bro,” he said. “I won’t do it. Even after my recent criticism of the National Council on Problem Gambling, a couple of friends who are in the same space reached out to me. ‘Yo, dude, why are you putting yourself on an island? There are gonna be people who don’t wanna work with you.’
“If people don’t wanna work with me because I’m calling out the National Council on Problem Gambling for taking money from Kalshi or any of the other sportsbooks or casino operators, I don’t wanna work with them either. And my biggest power is that I don’t need their fucking money to do what I do.”
Ruggiero then recounted a humorous story about FanDuel approaching him as a potential sponsor.
“I had lost over $880,000 just on their app alone,” he said. “And I said, ‘Do you want to send that back plus 10% interest for every year it’s been? Then we can talk. The guy started laughing. I was serious.”
