If you thought that detecting biased wheels was a new concept then you had better think again. A Yorkshireman by the name of Joseph Jaggers arrived in Monte Carlo in 1873. Like Darnborough, Jaggers held an intense fascination for the game of roulette. What Jaggers failed to accept was the belief that roulette could not be beaten and that the roulette wheels produced totally random results.

Jaggers for me was the real hero in the roulette roll of honour because it was he who first questioned the widely accepted belief that roulette was unbeatable except by cheating methods.

Biased wheels are like an itch that the casinos cannot scratch and despite all the hype about the current crop of wheels, it is not going to go away. What was remarkable about Jaggers was that unlike the vast majority of punters who have won big amounts of money on casino games, he had never set foot inside a casino before to anyone’s knowledge and he did not even know the intricacies of the game or the dealing procedures.

Just like Billy Walters over a hundred years later, Jaggers had a team of wheel clockers working for several days doing nothing but taking down numbers. Nothing like this had ever been seen before by the casino so they allowed it to happen without so much as a second thought. When Jaggers finally took it upon himself to enter the casino, he did so armed with the knowledge that one of the wheels was exhibiting a strong bias towards certain numbers.

It is on record that by the end of the day, Jaggers was ahead by $70,000. As he left, the casino could be forgiven for thinking that this was the last that they would see of this mysterious Englishman and that their worries were over….they were wrong! Jaggers returned the following day and proceeded to bet on the same numbers as he had bet the previous day and once again won more money.

Jaggers had losing spells but his winnings slowly but surely escalated during the day. The funny thing about this story was that the gaming action in the rest of the club almost ground to a halt while Jaggers was in action.

Jaggers was ahead by about $300,000 by the end of the day and to cap it all off, the casino had suffered substantial extra losses by other punters blindly following his numbers and backing them themselves. What followed was perhaps the first ever serious casino counter measure to counter a biased wheel player. After the casino had closed, they clandestinely switched the wheels around because by this time they did in fact suspect that something may be wrong with the wheel.

Jaggers came back to the casino again the following day and failed to notice the switch. He had lost $150,000 of his winnings back to the casino before he realised that something was not as it should. He had noticed certain marks in the grain of the wood on the wheel where he had been so successful and went searching for the wheel inside the casino….he found it!

Jaggers ramped up his winnings on this wheel to roughly $500,000. But by this time the casino bosses had figured out the likely cause of the biased wheel. They thought that the fault lie in the frets (dividers that separate the numbers) and decided to thwart Jaggers by replacing them after hours. Jaggers must surely have known or at least suspected that the casino would not stand for such large losses. Once he knew that they were on to him when they changed the wheels around, then he must have known that it was a matter of time before his run ended because the casino would simply have ended it for him by forcing him to stop or simply taking that particular wheel out of action.

The next day with the problem of the frets seemingly solved, the casino opened their doors to Joseph Jaggers once again. He proceeded to lose heavily and his winnings tumbled down to about $300,000. It was at this stage that Jaggers did the smart thing and quit and he lived the rest of his natural life an incredibly wealthy man. Even today I still drink a toast to Joseph Jaggers from time to time.

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

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