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UK
Casino Times
> In The Money
18 August 2005
In The Money
Inspiration for
online casino fans - true stories of great gambling
triumphs
The
man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo - A scientific
approach to cracking a casino's roulette wheels brought
immortality to a Yorkshire engineer
His real name was Joseph
Jaggers, but to UK online casino fans and punters everywhere
he will always be known as "The man who broke the bank at
Monte Carlo". In 1873 he took a glamorous casino for several
million quid in the wealthy principality that has long been
a gambling mecca for the well-oiled - and he even had a song
written about him.
Here's how it happened.
Jaggers (1830-1892) was an engineer and mechanic from the
Yorkshire cotton industry who had always adopted a rigorous
scientific approach to life. He had the idea of testing the
roulette wheels at the Beaux Arts Casino, Monte Carlo, to
see whether they were as evenly balanced as it was claimed.
He got the idea from the testing he regularly carried out on
the spindles of his cotton machines back home in
Yorkshire.
Secret
Number-Crunching
Never a man to do things
by halves, Jaggers hired six men to secretly note down the
numbers that the wheels brought up over a period of 12 hours
a day, over six consecutive days' gaming. Five of the wheels
showed no patterns at all in the numbers they brought up, as
of course they were designed not to do. But after a week's
statistical analysis of his data, Jaggers calculated that
the sixth showed a definite bias towards nine particular
numbers.
Jaggers entered the
Beaux-Arts armed with this clandestine knowledge, and in a
single night promptly won the equivalent of £35,000 in
today's money. By his fourth visit, his winnings were up
about £165,000.
The Casino Strikes
Back
On his next visit,
however, Jaggers began losing. The casino manager had
switched the wheels overnight, and Jaggers lost
£100,000 before he realised what had happened.
Eventually Jaggers managed to relocate his "lucky" wheel -
which he identified through a tell-tale scratch in the metal
- and got his accumulated winnings up to £225,000.
That's a sum worth something in the order of £15m
today.
The casino responded to
the losses again, this time by designing movable dividers
between the numbers on each wheel, which were rotated at
random each night. Jaggers played on, but not so
mysteriously his luck deserted him and he sustained a
two-day losing streak. He left still £160,000 ahead,
however and - being a scientist rather than a true gambler -
he never went back.
Immortality
Jaggers' exact method for
analysing the data he had collected is not known, but the
strategy of sending in a team to gather information on your
behalf and putting big money behind any anomalies that
emerge from your analysis is now a classic approach has been
adopted many times since by would-be
casino-breakers.
He died in 1892, the year
that the music hall song, The Man Who Broke The Bank At
Monte Carlo was written about him.
From The Man That Broke
The Bank At Monte Carlo, by Fred
Gilbert
"As I walk along the
Bois de Boulogne
With an independent air,
You can hear the girls declare:
'He must be a millionaire!'
You can hear them sigh and wish to die,
You can see them wink the other eye
At the man who broke the bank at Monte
Carlo!"
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