I was always told you can’t put a price on a human life but apparently Genting Hong Kong (the company that operates Star Cruises) has determined that $5 million Hong Kong dollars sounds about right.
It happened in Hong Kong but could probably happen on many other cruise ships; well any cruise ship that feels comfortable letting you gamble away an obscene amount of cash. After losing over 850,000 dollars at the baccarat table onboard Star Cruises, Superstar Aquarius a man identified only as Xu jumped to his death from the 13th deck.
On Saturday Xu boarded the ship for a two-day gambling trip. He reportedly started gambling just after dinner and kept it up until 8am Sunday morning. At that point he had lost a total of $857,000 (HK$5 million). A little while after he walked away from the tables he was seen on deck for about an hour (undoubtedly wondering WTF just happened), afterwards he jumped.
An alert was raised and after an hour long search, Xu’s body was retrieved from the water. Shortly thereafter the ship’s doctor declared Xu dead.
Being that I am not, nor will I ever be in a position to gamble away 850,000 dollars I have never given much thought to what the table limits are on cruise ships. However, after doing a very minimal amount of digging I see that there is a 200 dollar maximum on Carnival table games (I’d imagine other cruise lines have similar limits). It actually surprised me that the maximum bet was so high on a family focused cruise ship; I’ve never seen any high rollers on board.
What I wasn’t able to find out was if there was some sort of cap on how much they would allow you to lose on one cruise. Of course I already know the answer is that it’s not there problem if you lose your child’s college tuition, life savings or newlywed nest egg and it really isn’t their problem or their responsibility to save anyone from themselves. However, the humanitarian in me would like to think big business does understand and care about the ramifications of allowing a passenger to gamble such a large amount of money.
I’m a huge believer that each one of us is responsible for our own actions. But I must admit when I picture “Bob” ( the gambler who sits next to me at the blackjack table) doing a half gainer off the lido deck, while his wife and kids enjoy late night pizza my belief does get challenged. Do you think cruise lines should have a per cruise limit on how much someone is allowed to lose before they are cut off?
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