Over the past one hundred years or so, there have been certain individuals who have won huge amounts of money on roulette….and not by chance either or in some online casino! The characters that you are about to read about are real people and not fictitious movie characters. The reason why I have included them is mainly because firstly I wanted you to be aware of them and secondly, to make you aware that what I am saying is true because what these people did has been documented and so have the amounts.

If there was ever to be a roulette roll of honour then every single one of these talented and knowledgeable individuals would be on it and I salute them all because they were my inspiration.

The American Adventurer

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 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. Look out for the second part of this article elsewhere on the site.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson – Author of Killer Roulette

Related posts:

1. The American Adventurer part one In the last few years of the nineteenth century, a...
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3. The Kings of Roulette part three We fast forward in time now to 1986 to hear...
4. The American Adventurer part two I have read several reports down the years from individuals...
5. The Kings of Roulette part four Following on from part three and suddenly it clicked into...

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