Jul 10 2008
Famous roulette gamblers: Joseph Jagger
Everyone knows a few famous poker players. As a famous casino game, roulette, too, has its amazing players both in the past and the present day.
In the mid 1800’s Joseph Jagger, a British engineer, made a huge name for himself. In a brief but exciting roulette career, Jagger went down in gambling history (specifically roulette history) as “The Man Who Broke the Bank in Monte Carlo.”
Born in September 1830 in the village of Shelf in England, Joseph Hobson Jagger (sometimes reported as Jaggers) was a mechanic and engineer in the cotton industry. In 1873, he decided to apply his mechanical and engineering knowledge to the game of roulette. He seriously doubted the pure randomness of the roulette wheel. He believed that each individual wheel was built in a way as to create imbalances that would determine a bias in favor of particular numbers. These imbalances could skew the results of a roulette spin and a savvy gambler could take advantage of these discrepancies.
Eager to put his theory to the test, he hired 6 workers to secretly record the outcomes of the roulette wheels at the Beaux-Arts casino in Monte Carlo. Each clerk manned a different wheel. When he analyzed the results, Jagger found that five of the roulette wheels produced the random results that one would expect. On the sixth wheel, however, he found that nine particular numbers (7, 8, 9, 17, 18, 19, 22, 28 and 29) occurred more frequently than the others. Jagger concluded that the wheel was biased, that is imperfectly balanced.
He therefore placed his first bets on 7 July 1875 and quickly won a considerable amount of money, £14,000 (equivalent to around 50 times that amount, or £700,000 in 2005).
The Beaux-Arts Casino, of course, was not happy to be losing so much money. During the night, while the casino was closed, it moved all the roulette wheels around to different tables. The next morning, Jagger went to his usual roulette table but, facing an unbiased wheel, he did not win as he expected. He then realized that a tiny scratch that he had previously noticed on his biased wheel was no longer there. He surveyed the room, and found his biased roulette wheel, with its tell-tale scratch, at a different table. He started gambling again, and raised his total winnings to more than £60,000 and had a slew of impressed fellow gamblers copying his bets.
In response the casino rearranged the wheels, which threw Jagger into confusion. After a losing streak, Jagger finally recalled that a scratch he noted on the biased wheel wasn’t present. Looking for this telltale mark, Jagger was able to locate his preferred wheel and resumed winning. Counterattacking again, the casino moved the frets, metal dividers between numbers, around daily. Over the next two days Jagger lost and gave up, but he took his remaining earnings, two million francs, then about £65,000 (around £3,250,000 in 2005), and left Monte Carlo never to return.
Jagger resigned from his job at the mill and invested his money in property. He is buried at Bethel Church, Shelf.
In 1892, Fred Gilbert wrote a popular song, “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo” that is mistakenly attributed to Jagger’s exploits. Instead, the song is a celebration of Charles Wells, another Englishman, who in 1891 won handsomely in Monte Carlo. The song was popularized by the music hall star, Charles Coburn.
