In the last few years of the nineteenth century, a young man graduated from the University of Illinois by the name of William Nelson Darnborough and this man would eventually go down into roulette folklore. Darnborough drifted from job to job after leaving university but one thing remained…his intense fascination with roulette.

What attracted William to the game or fascinated him so greatly is not known but what is known about him is that he purchased his very own roulette wheel and studied the mechanics of it and its motion for considerable lengths of time. It is also known that he actually travelled across America taking on all comers winning considerable amounts of money from drifters and losing gamblers.

But the event that was to catapult Darnborough into the public eye was to happen in Monte Carlo. It was here that he won a reported £83,000 playing roulette which for that era was a staggering amount of money. This event happened in 1904 when Darnborough was in his mid thirties. There are accounts on record that were recorded by eye witnesses that were actually there.

All of them report that Darnborough moved with alarming speed when placing his bets and that he only started to place his bets after the dealer had spun the ball. What makes this event all the more remarkable was that Darnborough was far from being a one hit wonder and continued to hit the casinos very hard for a good number of years.

It is also reported that Darnborough did not play the same numbers from spin to spin which totally rules out that he may be playing lucky numbers or that he may have detected a biased wheel. At his peak Darnborough was reported to have won in the region of half a million from the casinos in Monte Carlo. A figure that would be the equivalent of tens upon tens of millions in today’s money.

I would have loved to have been there in person and watched the man in action but it seems ludicrous to me to try and explain this away “as just one of those things”. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever that what we have here is perhaps the first recorded case of a punter actually reading the spin. This was easier to do in the old days with the design of the casino roulette wheels at that time. They nearly all had deeper slots which meant that wherever a ball dropped, it tended to stay in that general area.

Darnborough was at it again in Monte Carlo in 1911 where he once again won a “very considerable sum of money”. The event that seemed to end Darnborough’s run was not anything done by the casino or the fact that he lost it back. He met and married an English girl named Frances who loathed gambling and she made William promise never to go back to that life ever again despite his success. Darnborough died in 1958 aged 90 never once telling anyone about just how he had managed to win this money that had made him so rich. Look out for part two on this remarkable person coming soon.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Killer Roulette”

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