About
Fact: 90% of Gambling Addicts Quit Right Before They’re About to Hit It Big refers to an exploitable 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 Instagram in mid-2022. Going into 2023, it was recaptioned across social media, becoming a snowclone with words being replaced by subsequent meme creators.
Origin
On June 6th, 2013, satirical news outlet The Onion published an article 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 user FuckThisThingInParticular reposted the image, with the post gaining over 12,000 views and 5,400 upvotes in eight years (shown below).
On July 2nd, 2022, Instagram user @trashcanpaul posted a Whisper post that had a similar caption, reading, “Fact: 90% of gambling addicts quit right before they’re about to hit it big.” Over the course of 10 months, the post gained roughly 140,900 likes (shown below). The post is the first discovered sharing of the image.
Spread
The meme was reposted across social media in the days that followed, going viral on Twitter, TikTok and on other Instagram pages. About a month later, on August 17th, 2022, Instagram 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 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 become more commonplace and more viral. For instance, on March 17th, 2023, Twitter 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 where it earned more engagement. On May 18th, 2023, iFunnier @N0T_Cypher posted an iteration about pilots ejecting, gaining roughly 13,500 smiles in 13 days (shown below, right).
More iterations surfaced on iFunny in the weeks that followed.
Various Examples
Search Interest
Unavailable.