Every Game Has its Superstars
Every sport has its legends; baseball has the Babe, golf has Jack Nicklaus, and basketball can boast Wilt Chamberlain. So it's not surprising that the game of roulette has its heroes, as well. They may not be as well known as Mickey Mantle or Tiger Woods but in roulette circles they are legendary, nonetheless.
William Nelson Damborough is a well-known roulette player who won big at the beginning of the 20th century. Legend has it that Damborough was able to predict the path of the ball - and its final resting place - with only his eye and his brain. He used to place his bets incredibly quickly after the croupier had spun the wheel. Damborough cleaned up regularly in Monte Carlo before World War I, winning 64,000 pound sterling (or the Monaco equivalency) in a single month in 1910.
Thirty years before Damborough's success story, Joseph Jagger found his way into roulette history. In 1873 he hired six underlings to keep track of the winning numbers at roulette wheels in a Monte Carlo casino. Armed with this information, Jagger discovered that certain numbers hit more than others and proceeded to take the casino for over $400,000 at the roulette table. In a sense, Jagger's team was the inspiration for blackjack teams such as the MIT Team. Teamwork, Jagger understood, is the key to victory.
Joe Jagger Was the First of a Long Line of Roulette Winners
A few years after Jagger swept through Monte Carlo, another gambler by the name of Charles Wells, visited the same venue. In just two outings, Wells took the casino for over 2 million francs. He was known as the Man Who Broker the Bank at Monte Carlo and he was immortalized in a song by that name, written by Fred Gilbert.
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Joe Jagger inspired the idea of teamwork and over a century after his 7-man team led him to riches, another team, called the Eudaemons tried to apply science to roulette. In the 1970s this group of University of California graduate students created a device to increase the odds of winning at roulette.
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The device - a small computer - worked and, for a short while, they made big bucks in Las Vegas casinos at the roulette table. Their good run ended when the device short-circuited and burned one of the members of the Eudaemon team but, for a while, they were on a roll.
Most recently, a determined gambler by the name of Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo gave the roulette wheel in a Spanish casino his fullest attention. Using a computer he tried to figure out which number was hit most often over a long period of time. His efforts paid off and in the mid-1990s he won over a million dollars over the course of a few years. Garcia-Pelayo is last in a long line of roulette heroes but chances are he won't be last for long.
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