Variant 2 The Three Wishes

This story follows a very similar plot line to Gambling Hansel; it begins with a not-so-noble male protagonist who, by providing some minor help to god, gains three wishes. Similarly, those wishes are meant to further the protagonist's vile goals; and in both Gambling Hansel and The Three Wishes the protagonist asks for an item that traps a particular person to a location. In The Three Wishes this is taken to the extreme because the protagonist uses two of these wishes for this purpose explicitly and the last wish is used for a very similar purpose, albeit accidentally. The similarities don’t end at the wishes, either, because the devil is interacted with in both stories, as well as the god figure or priest that grants the initial three wishes. In both stories, the wishes are used to fuel an unhealthy habit; when challenged, the protagonist uses cunning to trap his antagonist in situations where he gets the advantage. At the end of the story the protagonist is seen floating between various afterlives and ends up in both not finding a place in any of them because of being denied from all of them. This ends with the protagonist living as some sort of spirit or undead entity that affects the mortal realm. This ending is similar to Gambling Hansel’s, when Hansel has his soul shattered. In this way, The Three Wishes is a much more extended but structurally similar variation of Gambling Hansel.
  Glassine, H. H., & Internet Archive (1985). Irish folktales. In Internet Archive. New York: Pantheon Books https://archive.org/details/irishfolktales00glas/page/311/mode/1up