Joe Jagger May be Mick's Cousin but He's Way More, Too
Joseph Jagger was a British engineer who has gone down in gambling history (specifically roulette history) as - arguably - "The Man Who Broke the Bank in Monte Carlo." No less important, he is said to be related to Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones.
Born in 1830 in Yorshire, England, Joseph Hobson Jagger, became infatuated with roulette at an early age. He was a mechanic in the cotton industry and it was this background that led him to speculate re the mechanics of the roulette wheel. Specifically, he seriously doubted the pure randomness of the roulette wheel; he believed that each individual wheel was built in a way as to create imbalances that would determine a bias in favor of particular numbers. These imbalances could skew the results of a roulette spin and a savvy gambler could take advantage of these discrepancies.
Joe Jagger Knew the Value of Teamwork
Jagger was eager to put his theory to the test. In 1873 he hired 6 workers to secretly record the outcomes of the roulette wheels at the Beaux-Arts casino in Monte Carlo. Each clerk manned a different wheel. As he suspected, one of the wheels favored certain numbers on a fairly consistent basis. With this information at hand, after a few days of research, he hit the casino full blast and took Monte Carlo by storm. In just a few days, he won over 60,000 pounds and had a slew of impressed fellow gamblers copying his bets.
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At one point, the casinos, in an effort to re-take the upper hand, moved the wheels around, temporarily confusing Jagger who had "misplaced" his favorite wheel. He lost at first, but then he re-located the biased wheel (which he remembered had been marked with a small scratch) and continued winning, amassing more than 2 million francs (almost $450,000).
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After his big winning streak, Jagger quit his job at the cotton mill and invested his considerable roulette winnings. A song written in 1892 by Fred Gilbert, called "The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo," is supposedly written about Joe Jagger (though a conflicting theory says it's about Charles Wells, another roulette legend of that era). Song or no song, Joe Jagger is the first and foremost roulette hero.
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