In The Money - The man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo

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!"