Joseph Jagger: The Man Who Broke the Bank

The Roulette Player Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo

Joseph Jagger was a great 19th-century roulette player. In a brief but exciting roulette career, Jagger went down in roulette history as "The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo."

Joseph Jagger was born in 1830 in the village of Shelf in England. He became a mechanic and engineer in the cotton industry. In 1873, he decided to apply his mechanical and engineering knowledge to the game of roulette. All human inventions, he understood, were prone to imperfection. What if there were imperfections in the roulette wheel that he could exploit to his advantage?

Gambling on a Biased Roulette Wheel

With these thoughts in mind, Jagger hired six clerks to observe the six roulette wheels at the Beaux-Arts Casino in Monte Carlo and to secretly record all the winning numbers. 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 appeared more often than mere chance could account for. Jagger concluded that the wheel was biased — i.e., imperfectly balanced.

Jagger put his knowledge to work and started gambling on the biased roulette wheel. Over the course of four days, he won $300,000.

The Roulette Casino Fights Back — Round I

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 $450,000.

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The Roulette Casino Fights Back — Round II

This time, the casino went all out to defeat Joseph Jagger. Each night after closing, they would take the roulette wheel apart and move the frets (the little metal barriers that separate the numbers on the wheel) around to different locations on the roulette wheel. Playing against the reconfigured wheel, Jagger went on a two-day losing streak. Eventually, he gave up. He took his $325,000 remaining profit and left Monte Carlo. He never played roulette again.

Jagger resigned from his job at the cotton mill and invested his $325,000 in roulette winnings — equivalent to about $5 million in today's money — in real estate. In 1892, a song about his exploits, called "The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo," became a popular hit throughout Great Britain. Thus Joseph Jagger was immortalized in roulette history.