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The
Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte
Carlo
 Inspiration
for online casino fans - a true story of a great
gambling triumph. We take a look at the man who
broke the bank at Monte Carlo by taking a
scientific approach to cracking a casino's
Roulette wheels, bringing immortality to a
Yorkshire engineer.
His
real name was Joseph Jaggers, but to
Online
Casinos
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 UK pounds in the wealthy principality that
has long been a gambling mecca for the well-oiled -
and he even had a song written about
him.
Unfortunately,
online roulette players are unlikely to repeat his
brilliant achievement - at least, not the way he
did it.
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.
Roulette
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' Roulette 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 roulette winnings were up about
£165,000.
The
Casino Strikes Back!
On
his next visit, however, Jaggers began losing. The
casino manager had switched the roulette wheels
overnight, and Jaggers lost a cool £100,000
before he realised what had happened overnight.
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 in
profit, however and - being a scientist rather than
a true gambler - he never went back to lose it
all.
Roulette
Immortality
Jaggers'
exact method for analysing the roulette 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.
Joseph
Jaggers died in 1892, the year that the music hall
song, The Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo was
written about him.
Joseph
Jaggers, we salute you. If only the same tactic
would work for us Online Roulette
players!
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