MONTE CARLO

Greymouth Evening Star, 19 December 1934, Page 11

MONTE CARLO

EX-KAISER'S SYSTEM. Reviewing “The Devil's Playground,” by Paul de Ketchiva. the London “Daily Telegraph” states: It is rather a pity that Mr. de Ketchiva should have deemed it necessary to garnish these reminiscences of twenty years as a casino croupier with so much of the stock verbiage about glittering vice and sensational tragedy, for he has some good stories to tell which do not gain from twopence-coloured flamboyance. There is one about the ex-Kaiser, for instance, learning on a visit to the Riviera before the war that a certain Professor Schott, of Heidelberg, had devised a new and perfect gambling system. After discussing it with the inventor he offered to purchase it for a Jump sum. “The Professor, doubtless deciding that cash in hand was worth all in the Casino bank, agreed, and sold his secret to the German Emperor, who several days later paid an incognito visit to the Casino and tried it. To the intense chagrin and annoyance of the All Highest, the system lost him 5,000 louis to the bank!” The only person who has ever really defeated the bank at Monte Carlo we are told, was an engineer from the North of England, named Jaggers. The roulette wheels, he argued, could not be so perfectly balanced as not to bias in the direction of certain numbers. So with a few thousand pounds capital he embarked on his scheme. “Taking into his employ several clerks, he set them to watch all the roulette wheels in the Casino and make lists of the winning numbers. Each night he went carefully over these and was able to detect that certain numbers came up more than others at each table. Making a chart of these numbers he went to the Casino, and, fortified by the peculiarities of each wheel, he began to play. In a few days he had relieved the bank of £120,000.” We are told that Ludendorff once broke the bank and won 150,000 francs; that Sarah Bernhardt lost 1.000,000 francs and tried to commit suicide; that Andre Citroen, “the Henry Ford of France,” has broken the bank three times in one evening.