Roulette Exploits
Tales abound of this gentleman or that lady who hit it big off the croupiers’ spins of the roulette wheel over all the centuries the game has been played. This alludes to the allure, mystique and rich history roulette has enjoyed around the world since its inception in Paris late in the 18th century, but there are some stories that still regale followers of the game today.
Undoubtedly the most notorious of these individuals must be Joseph Jaggers. The engineer who hailed from Great Britain during the 1800’s worked with cotton machines in Yorkshire and decided to proceed with a hypothesis he had developed from his employment experience in 1873.
Jaggers engaged six colleagues to transcribe all the numbers that hit in the Beaux Arts Casino in Monte Carlo. After examining the results, he ventured to Monte Carlo himself in 1875 and collected more than $3 million in winnings from the roulette wheel.
What Jaggers unearthed in his analysis was one of the wheels was spinning towards one particular side, so he just continued to wager on that particular circumstance. Eventually the casinos caught on and remedied the error, but not before Jaggers amassed his fortune which he later invested in real estate.
Although he is not quite as famous as Jaggers, Charles Wells was another individual who pulled an extensive amount of cash from Monte Carlo’s gambling coffers, but his method was not quite the same as his fellow Englishman.
In 1891 Wells started small, but gradually increased his wagers to nearly 2,000 francs each spin of the wheel. He ‘broke the bank’ or cleaned out the house reserves on six different occasions and compiled more than $2 million francs on his three trips to Monte Carlo in . He became a celebrity of sorts in London and was even hounded by teams of investigators to deduce how he had fleeced the casinos, since it had to have been through a seedy path, but nothing negative was ever discovered.
Unfortunately, Wells, who was known as “The Man The Broke The Bank” died penniless after serving an eight year prison sentence in London in 1926. He always told people that inquired to how he managed to pull of his feat it was an even mixture of the Martingale process and lots of Lady Luck.
As technology has advanced instances of using the bias of the wheel to line players’ pockets has diminished to a trickle, but many still hope they will be the next gambler to follow in these two gentlemen’s shoes.
