Shuhei is leading a tough life. His alcoholic mother Akiko can only hook up with bad guys and order Shuhei to go get money from his disapproving grandparents instead of going to school. Except raising the little half-sister, his rock-bottom life seems to have no end.
Gambling addiction bring the stories of three otherwise unconnected people together as it destroys each of their lives.
Dan Mahowny was a rising star at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. At twenty-four he was assistant manager of a major branch in the heart of Toronto's financial district. To his colleagues he was a workaholic. To his customers, he was astute, decisive and helpful. To his friends, he was a quiet, but humorous man who enjoyed watching sports on television. To his girlfriend, he was shy but engaging. None of them knew the other side of Dan Mahowny--the side that executed the largest single-handed bank fraud in Canadian history, grossing over $10 million in eighteen months to feed his gambling obsession.
A gambling addict faces a conflict when entrusted with keeping a bunch of money that isn't his.
Anthony Keller, star of his NYC high school basketball team, is riding his way to Cornell on a sports scholarship. But he can only maintain his popular jock facade for so long, as his troubled father Lee has a gambling addiction that threatens to derail his dreams both on and off the court.
After a childhood of abuse by his evangelistic father, misfit Oscar Hopkins becomes an Anglican minister and develops a divine obsession with gambling. Lucinda Leplastrier is a rich Australian heiress shopping in London for materials for her newly acquired glass factory back home. Deciding to travel to Australia as a missionary, Oscar meets Lucinda aboard ship, and a mutual obsession blossoms. They make a wager that will alter each of their destinies.
A gambler, fresh out of prison, and a beautiful hooker find themselves caught in an underground scheme that's spinning wildly out of control.
Montreal, Winter 2002. Stéphane, 19 years old, fan of Metal, student in graphic design, dreams of becoming an illustrator. But for months he has been caught in a threatening spiral: he is addicted to games. Indebted, without an apartment, avoiding his friends to whom he owes money, Stéphane takes a job as a dishwasher in a restaurant in a major Italian restaurant in Montreal in order to get by. There, he will meet Bébert, a cook who burns the candle at both ends, and Greg, a waiter with disreputable actions. Will Stéphane make it through this new job or will he fall into a downward spiral of bad choices?
Lena is seven months pregnant and she's ready to sell the baby in her belly. Ermanno agrees to pretend to be the father. Fabio, the uncle of Ermanno, will pay them to buy the child that he and his wife Bianca cannot have. A fake adoption between relatives, a loophole to bypass the law in Italy. A world in which money is the only standard of value, the only thing that matters. Ermanno and Lena are two strangers that must pretend in public to be a couple and live together until the delivery. They are used to only thinking about themselves and they fight all the time. But living side by side they start becoming what they were only pretending to be.
A disgraced sports star and gambling addict attempts to turn his life around with the support of his number one fan.
A struggling architect, being sued for divorce by his wife and struggling with booze and gambling, finds work remodeling a friend's strip club, the Paradise. There he meets a transsexual stripper who is bothered by accurate, but extremely violent visions of future events. The increasingly violent visions start including the architect, who doesn't believe in the prophesy. One who does however is a psychiatrist who is seeing both the stripper and the architect and is sleeping with the ex-wife. He uses the prophecies for his own financial gain. Finally the scenes from the vision move into reality amidst many plot turns.
When he thinks his brother has let him down, a cowboy goes bad.
The cheapest drivers in the hearse business, gambling addict Risto Kivi and his friend Arto Niska, an 85% brainless man, have found themselves in a situation where everything has gone wrong and a fresh start is needed.
Former sports gambling addict Chance needs $60,000 to save his mother from nursing home eviction. So he falls back into his old habits, only to learn he's never lost a bet on Christmas. Is this the Christmas miracle he's been waiting for? Or just an addict who can't control himself?
A young girl is taken with a boy that she meets, but he leads her into gambling where she begins losing money, becomes desperate, and starts to steal.
A father has less than a day to pay back a debt to a violent loan shark, while looking after his young son.
Swaying between pleasure and despair, Elric throws himself into his pathological passion for the casino. Meeting Suzie could have saved him, but the young woman also sinks into gambling hell. The couple then start getting involved in the fearsome world of professional cheaters.
Young girls are cheated into rigged gambling games and then forced into prostitution to pay off their debts.
Dario, a young electronics enthusiast, decides in the late evening to take a trip down the street to throw out the garbage to kill time - waiting for his "freeze-dried tart" to finish ...getting ready - but his return to home is hindered by many bizarre, violent and out of the ordinary characters who one after another involve him in their delusions, making him run far and wide.