The popularity of roulette, is certainly partly due to it’s rich and varied history. The game itself has been around for over 250 years so it’s hardly surprising it has developed a whole variety of systems, stories and even legends. Joseph Jagger is a name familiar to all those who seek a system or method that will make their fortune in the casinos through a massive roulette payout.
His background was certainly a distance from the fabulous casinos of Monte Carlo, he was in fact a lowly engineer from a small Yorkshire town. Josephs interest in engineering led him to study the roulette wheel itself and he became convinced that many of these wheels would have imperfections that could create a bias in the numbers that were spun. In the European casinos, the house advantage is so slight that any small bias could lead to huge winnings for a clever gambler.
For the majority of people the dream would have probably ended there, but Joseph Jagger was made of better stuff and sought to put his plans into practice. So in 1873, the intrepid Mr Jagger hired 6 clerks and they all set out for Monte Carlo, quite a journey in those days. The clerks were hired to record and analyse every spin on as many roulette wheels as possible in the casino, their aim to spot any bias however small. It was like nothing the casinos had ever seen, so in the end they simply let the clockers do their work.
In 1875 the next phase of the plan was ready for action, the clockers though they had identified a single biased wheel that appeared to favour a certain group of numbers. Joseph didn’t wait around, the next day he started playing the identified table betting in line with the bias. His very first day he won over $70,000 an enormous sum in 1875. The bias of course was not as obvious so that it guaranteed winning consistently but the edge it represented meant they were bound to win in the long run. The next day, Jagger won even more – approximately $300,000 and people following his bets won too !
By this time Joseph Jagger had become a serious problem to the casinos who were losing vast amounts of money. They weren’t even certain how Joseph Jagger was winning but suspected it was due to the wheels somehow. That night they switched all the table around and the next day Jagger was unaware that he was gambling at a different table. He began to lose heavily before he noticed his mistake, noticing that the wheel was missing some familiar scratch marks. He went in search of his ‘biased’ wheel and pretty soon started winning again. The Casino owners had now figured out the problem, the wheel was indeed biased due to some problem with the frets – the little dividers between the slots on a wheel. They replaced the offending equipment and removed the bias on that particular roulette wheel. With Jaggers advantage removed he started to lose heavily, but he was no mug and soon stopped gambling and cashed in his winnings. His profit was something equal to about 5 million dollars today, he paid up his associates and returned to Yorkshire to quit his job and invest his winnings.
This phenomenal man was often touted as being the ‘man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo’ although this isn’t quite true he achieved amazing success. He certainly engineered one of the biggest roulette payouts ever and the engineer from Yorkshire certainly caused a stir.
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