In Russian news of the weird, a man supposedly put his wife up as poker stakes, and lost:

Andrei Karpov from Murmansk had run out of money in a game of poker and offered his opponent his wife instead of cash to stay in the game.

When he lost the game and his opponent Sergey Brodov turned up to claim his winnings his wife Tatiana was so angry she decided to divorce her husband and started a relationship with Brodov. [Link]

A similar scenario unfolded in M.G. Vassanji’s Elvis, Raja:

In “When She Was Queen”, the expatriates — now old and rich — settle down in Canada and are playing a game of cards. At some point they get so involved that the stakes are raised and, in an enactment of the Draupadi scene, the wife is gambled away against the opponent’s dream house. Much later when the narrator, determined to find out if the taunts he has been subjected to are true, confronts the card player, he tells him, “It was only a game. She left my house unmolested. Dr. Singh, her physician, took her away.” [Link]

… what took me by surprise was the first line of the story, which apparently is the first story of the book: “My father lost my mother one evening in a final round of gambling at the poker table.” Haven’t we heard a somewhat similar beginning in a Márquez book? [Link]