If you’ve watched Youtube over the last several years, you may have stumbled upon Youtube’s most popular casino streamer Vegas Matt.
His video uploads aren’t sophisticated, nor is his setup. His videos are largely filmed from an iPhone camera mounted on a tripod and placed in front of a slot machine.
What ensues is friendly banter between Matt himself, his son EJ, and their two friends WBG, short for World’s Best Gambler, and W2, a witty character that often chimes in with humor.
The four gamble away thousands upon thousands of dollars, sometimes losing, and sometimes netting huge victories for themselves, and their bank accounts.
Though Vegas Matt started his Youtube channel back in 2007, it sat dormant largely until 2022, when his son EJ first uploaded a video of Matt getting a royal flush on a video poker machine.
This video was uploaded to TikTok and Youtube, and started blowing up immediately. His son EJ knew right away that they had something special.
Since then, Matt has gained over 1.4 Million subscribers on Youtube, and is now considered the top gambler in the online influencer space. Where did Vegas Matt come from?
More importantly, how did he make enough money to lose over $400k a year gambling and not go broke?
Who Is Vegas Matt?
Vegas Matt’s real name is Stephen Matt Morrow. He was born October 4, 1963, in Orinda, California. Orinda is a quiet suburb east of Oakland.
Matt went to Miramonte High School, studied business economics at UC Santa Barbara, graduated in 1985, and spent the next several decades attempting several businesses.
He tried, he failed, he won, he lost, and he moved on.
Morrow is 61 years old. Possibly the most interesting thing about him isn’t that he gambles, it’s how he got here, what it took to make losing money a business model, and who else is quietly winning every time he hits record.
Matt Before Vegas: A Humble Beginning
Vegas Matt tells a succinct story about his beginnings. He studied business, got into sales, discovered network marketing, built a fortune, and eventually retired to Las Vegas, where he semi-professionally gambled until his son convinced him to put it on the internet.
The truth is a little more complicated.
After college, Morrow bounced through jobs he couldn’t stand, including a stint at Dean Witter that he left because he didn’t like the pace of the work.
What did suit him was the energy of a sales pitch, the feeling of working a room. He found that in multi-level marketing. In 1989 he got involved with a company called FundAmerica, which sold members rebates on airline tickets and long-distance phone calls.
It collapsed almost immediately. The founder was arrested in 1990. FundAmerica filed for bankruptcy shortly after.
Though the vessel he was using to generate his income disappeared overnight, Morrow kept going. He eventually became a top earner at Vemma, a dietary supplement company that operated for years before the Federal Trade Commission sued it in 2015 for operating as a pyramid scheme.
Among the FTC’s allegations was that Vemma systematically targeted college students. The company settled and shut down.
Morrow has defended his multi-level marketing involvement consistently and without much apology.
His position, stated on camera while recruiting for Vemma, was that “MLMs” fail because of the people involved, not the model.
“We’re looking for cool people. If you’re some unemployed, broke, annoying person, no one is going to listen to you.” – Vegas Matt
Morrow also describes himself as a former Hollywood film producer. He financed Night of the Demons, a 1988 horror film. He ran a bed and breakfast at some point. He moved into real estate.
By the time he arrived in Las Vegas around 2012, he had money, not casino-floor money, but actual accumulated wealth.
Vegas Matt’s Royal Flush That Started Everything
In 2021, Stephen Morrow was 58 years old and sitting at a video poker machine, down $9,000 and needing a miracle. He was dealt the ace and queen of hearts. The machine came through with the jack, king, and ten — all hearts. A royal flush.
The payout was $12,060. He pulled out his phone and filmed himself grinning at the screen.
His son EJ, then 28, watched the clip that night and thought it might do something online. They came up with the name Vegas Matt, posted the video to TikTok, and it got 40,000 views.
The next day, father and son went back to try filming a second royal flush. They got nothing. Matt called it an “absolute s*** sandwich” on camera.
That video got 112,000 views.
The lesson in the video registered to EJ and Matt immediately. The loss was more interesting than the win.
Morrow kept filming. Video after video, session after session. He and EJ developed the format: Matt counts out the money, makes the bet, plays the game. The camera angle puts the viewer in the seat beside him. He doesn’t pretend to have a system. He doesn’t claim special knowledge. He just bets, and most of the time, he loses.
The channel grew through 2022 and exploded in the years after. By early 2025, he crossed one million YouTube subscribers. His Instagram sits at roughly a million as well. His TikTok is close to 700,000.
Losing Money To Make Money: Vegas Matt’s Business Model
Here is the part that confuses most people: Vegas Matt losing money is not a problem. It is the product.
EJ has said publicly that roughly 70 percent of the channel’s revenue comes from YouTube advertisements.
The remaining 30 percent splits between sponsorships and merchandise, including a $55 pink hoodie with “Gamble” written in cursive, and a magnet that says “Sando,” a catchphrase his regulars know immediately.
In December 2024, the channel logged 5.7 million watch hours in a single month. YouTube runs a commercial roughly every ten minutes.
On top of the ad revenue, Morrow is a paid ambassador for FanDuel Casino, announced in 2024 as the company’s first official brand ambassador for its iGaming operations across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Michigan, and West Virginia.
He has partnered with Virgin Voyages to host luxury fan cruises. Casino properties pay him for appearances and exclusive content. He films at the Peppermill Reno, the El Cortez, Resorts World, and they are happy to have him there.
The gambling losses are not separate from the revenue. They are the content that generates the revenue. In 2024 he reportedly lost $404,000 at the casino, a figure he confirmed on his own channel in a year-end video.
He finished that year on a losing streak bad enough that he briefly tapped money outside his gambling budget to keep filming. He considered cutting from seven production days a week to five. He didn’t. The YouTube residuals Matt makes from his videos covers everything.
The casino takes his money. YouTube gives it back.
What Does Vegas Matt Actually Do?
Vegas Matt has quite the life. He shows up at a casino, most often the El Cortez, and plays high-limit slots, blackjack, and baccarat. Bets range from several hundred dollars to several thousand per hand or spin.
He has pushed $5,000 into a slot at $1,125 per spin. He has turned a $6,627 slot ticket into a lost baccarat hand in under ten seconds.
His biggest documented on-camera win before 2025 was $130,000 on a slot machine called Regal Riches in September 2023, enough, he said, to get even for the month. His worst documented single session was a $147,000 loss in about three hours in 2023, when he and friends got deep into a high-limit machine together. The video description read:
“Nobody should gamble like this, my friends got a little carried away.”
He posts every day. No weekends off.
When his YouTube channel crossed one million subscribers, he celebrated by wagering $1 million in a single session at the Peppermill Reno.
The video ended on a $100,000 hand of baccarat that they won. It remains one of the most referenced milestones in gambling YouTube history.
EJ handles the editing, the algorithm, the behind-the-scenes strategy. Matt is the talent and the bankroll.
Why Do People Watch Vegas Matt?
Slate journalist Luke Winkie spent a day with Morrow in January 2025 and found fans at the El Cortez who had traveled specifically to watch him gamble in person. They stood around the baccarat table studying how he cut chips.
In a few hours, Morrow lost close to $30,000. Nobody left.
The channel works because Vegas Matt is not a poker genius. He has no discernible edge. He sits at the same games that lose for everyone, bets at sizes that are insane by normal standards but cinematic on screen, and reacts the way any of us would.
He is a projection of every person who has ever told themselves one more hand and didn’t mean it.
Morrow told Winkie he was bullied as a kid and felt like an outcast growing up. The celebrity — the fans gathering around, the Rolls, the ring, is, by his own admission, a bigger thrill than the gambling itself. The gambling is just the mechanism that makes his celebrity possible.
Casinos Win Every Time Vegas Matt Posts A Video
Here’s the thing nobody says out loud in the comments section: Vegas Matt is not the only one getting rich off his gambling.
Every dollar he loses goes somewhere. At the El Cortez, at Resorts World, at Peppermill Reno, at every property that appears in the background of his videos, the house is winning.
That is, of course, how casinos work. But Vegas Matt is not just a customer.
He is a marketing vehicle with over a million followers who watch him treat $3,000 slots sessions like routine entertainment, making the casino floor feel aspirational and fun rather than what it also is: a place designed at an architectural and psychological level to extract money from people.
The World Health Organization published a fact sheet in 2024 warning that gambling harms are escalating globally and that the normalization of high-stakes play, specifically through digital channels, is accelerating the problem.
The agency estimated that 1.2 percent of the world’s adult population has a gambling disorder, and called for bans on gambling-related advertising and sponsorship. That context exists whether or not Vegas Matt ever acknowledges it.
Casinos benefit from his presence twice. First, directly, he loses hundreds of thousands of dollars on their floors every year, money that flows straight into their books. Second, indirectly, his audience of over a million people watches him gamble daily, absorbing the idea that high-limit play is entertainment, that the Rolls-Royce and the gold chain are what wait on the other side of enough bets.
Casinos invite him to their properties, comp his sessions, feature him in promotions. They are not doing that out of hospitality. They are doing it because a man with a million followers who films himself losing at their tables is worth more than any billboard on the Strip.
The arrangement has no natural ceiling. Morrow gambles more to produce more content. More content grows the audience.
A bigger audience makes him more valuable to casinos and sponsors. More sponsor money funds more gambling. The loop is closed, clean, and entirely in the interest of the gaming industry.
The Complications Of Vegas Matt’s Success
None of this is illegal. None of it is even unusual in the influencer economy, where the line between content and advertisement has been dissolving for years.
Morrow is careful to include responsible gambling disclaimers. He says, consistently, that nobody should gamble the way he gambles.
The Slate profile caught him saying his channel is “like watching a reality show,” and reality television has always gotten a pass on the consequences of what it normalizes because it is, technically, just watching someone else’s choices.
But Vegas Matt’s MLM past adds a layer that is hard to ignore. Both FundAmerica and Vemma recruited heavily on aspirational imagery, look at this lifestyle, look at what’s possible, join us.
The Vegas Matt channel runs on the same emotional architecture: look at this Rolls, look at this life, watch me bet ten grand on a slot and shrug it off. The ask is different. The pitch is structurally identical.
Morrow was a high earner in those MLMs, which means he was near the top of pyramids that extracted money from people below him. He has defended all of it, consistently.
Where Does Vegas Matt Stand Today?
As of early 2026, Vegas Matt has over 1.4 million YouTube subscribers and approaching a billion total channel views.
He has a book coming titled The Art of Being Lucky. Television deals have been discussed. His annual documented gambling losses run into the hundreds of thousands. His annual revenue runs well above that.
He is, by any measure, winning. The question worth asking is who else is winning alongside him, and whether the million people watching understand they are not just an audience.
They are, for the casinos and the sponsors and the gaming industry at large, the point of the whole exercise.
Vegas Matt built a career on being the guy who loses. That took nerve and intelligence and, it has to be said, a pretty sophisticated understanding of how to make other people’s money without technically taking it from them directly.
The casino takes his money. YouTube gives it back. The audience gets the show.
And somewhere in Nevada, the house is counting its take from all three.
Frequently Asked Questions About Vegas Matt
What is Vegas Matt’s real name? Vegas Matt’s real name is Stephen Matt Morrow. He was born October 4, 1963, in Orinda, California.
How much money has Vegas Matt lost gambling? In 2024 alone, Vegas Matt confirmed on his own YouTube channel that he lost $404,000 gambling. That figure covers on-camera casino sessions and represents his single most documented annual loss total on record.
How does Vegas Matt make money if he keeps losing? Vegas Matt’s income comes primarily from YouTube ad revenue, which EJ Morrow has said accounts for roughly 70 percent of the channel’s total earnings. The remaining 30 percent comes from sponsorships and merchandise. In December 2024, the channel logged 5.7 million watch hours in a single month. YouTube serves a commercial roughly every ten minutes. His FanDuel ambassadorship, casino appearance fees, and Virgin Voyages cruise partnerships add additional revenue on top of that. The gambling losses fund the content. The content funds everything else.
How many subscribers does Vegas Matt have? As of early 2026, Vegas Matt has over 1.4 million YouTube subscribers, approximately one million Instagram followers, and close to 700,000 followers on TikTok.
How old is Vegas Matt? Vegas Matt is 61 years old, born October 4, 1963.
Where does Vegas Matt gamble? Vegas Matt films primarily at the El Cortez Hotel and Casino in downtown Las Vegas, which has become closely associated with his brand. He also regularly films at Resorts World Las Vegas and the Peppermill Reno in Nevada.
What casino does Vegas Matt go to? Vegas Matt’s home casino is the El Cortez in downtown Las Vegas. He is a regular presence there and has built much of his channel identity around the property.
When did Vegas Matt start his YouTube channel? Vegas Matt’s YouTube channel was technically created in 2007, but remained largely dormant until 2021 when his son EJ posted a viral TikTok of Matt hitting a royal flush on a video poker machine. The daily upload format that built his audience began in earnest in October 2022.
