The story of a man play a game of roulette in a casino

au8live

The year was 1873 when Englishman Joseph Jaggers (1830-1892) made his fantastic run on the Beaux-Arts Monte Carlo Casino.

An engineer and mechanic in the cotton industry in Yorkshire, his nuts-and-bolts background led him to ponder the mechanics of roulette wheels.

Were they perfectly balanced? Were the numbers the shiny little ball landed on truly random, or were some numbers more likely to come up than others?

Those questions in mind, Jaggers hired six clerks to record every number that came up on the roulette wheels in the 12 hours a day the casino was open. He then spent the next six days poring over the numbers, searching for the roulette winning strategy.

He found what he was looking for. Though five of the casino’s six wheels produced predictably random results, nine numbers in particular kept showing up on the sixth at a rate far exceeding what natural probability would have indicated. Clearly, the wheel was biased.

The first day’s foray against the casino netted him roughly $70,000. By the fourth day his winnings pushed $300,000.

His system prompted croupiers to begin spinning the ball in the opposite direction of the wheel spin.