90 Percent of Gambling Addicts Quit Right Before X

Submission 36,304

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About

Fact: 90% of Gambling Addicts Quit Right Before They're About to Hit It Big is an exploitable meme template that involves recaptioning a Whisper post showing the cast of The Sopranos playing poker with text related to the Keep Gambling memes about gambling addiction. The first-known sharing of the meme was on TikTok in mid-2022. Going into 2023, it was recaptioned across social media, becoming a phrasal template with words being replaced by subsequent meme creators.

Origin

On June 6th, 2013, satirical news outlet The Onion published an article^[1] titled "Study: 83% Of Gamblers Quit Right Before They Would Have Hit The Big One" (snippet shown below, left), with the subheadline reading, "A new study says a majority of gamblers walk away from the table right before becoming millionaires." Prior to November 9th, 2014, an unknown user posted an image macro reading, "Proven fact: 90% of gambling addicts quit right before they would have hit it big!" The image had a watermark reading "Brock Sherwood." On November 9th, Imgur^[2] user FuckThisThingInParticular reposted the image, with the post gaining over 12,000 views and 5,400 upvotes in eight years (shown below).

On June 8th, 2022, TikTok^[3] user sopranosclips4.0 made a slideshow post using with characters from The Sopranos that had a similar caption, reading, "Fact: 90% of gambling addicts quit right before they're about to hit it big." (shown below). In nearly two years, the post gained over 20,000 views and over 2,300 likes. The post is the first discovered sharing of the image.

Spread

The July 2nd, 2022, meme from @sopranosclips4.0 was reposted across social media in the days that followed, going viral on Twitter, ^[4] TikTok ^[5] and on other Instagram^[6] pages.

About a month later, on August 17th, 2022, Instagram^[7] user @okschizo uploaded the first discovered recaption of the meme, replacing words to reference Meme Page Admins, gaining roughly 2,300 likes in nine months (shown below, left). Months later, on December 2nd, 2022, Instagram^[8] user @ceo.of.socialism posted a meme that used the phrasal template to reference "socialist countries" going "revisionist," gaining roughly 2,200 likes in five months (shown below, right).

In early 2023, the recaptioning of The Sopranos Whisper post became more commonplace and viral. For instance, on March 17th, 2023, Twitter^[9] user @Amanseeks tweeted an iteration about "frontal assaults," gaining over 240 likes in two months (shown below, left). It was soon reposted elsewhere, like Tumblr ^[10] where it earned further engagement. On May 18th, 2023, iFunnier ^[11] @N0T_Cypher posted an iteration about pilots ejecting, gaining roughly 13,500 smiles in 13 days (shown below, right).