Bank Breaking at Monte Carlo

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 608, 9 March 1929, Page 18

Bank Breaking at Monte Carlo

Fortunes with Systems ANY schemes have been tiff!] elal3 ° rate(2 * or breaking the bank at Monte Carlo; some of them legitimate, others the reverse. Among the unlawful schemes, surely the most ingenious ever conceived was put forward by Vaquier, the rascally Frenchman who was hanged in England in 1924 lor the murder of a By fleet innkeeper. The story is told by Paul de Ketchiva in his newly-published book, “Confessions of a Croupier.” Briefly, the idea was to control the workings of the roulette wheel by means of wireless rays. Vaquier’s contention was that if a croupier could contrive to fit an instrument he himself had invented to the axis of the pendulum of a roulette wheel, this could be controlled by a miniature w'ireless set worked from any part of the Casino. He tried to get the author to act as his accomplice, but of course met with a refusal. A croupier’s job at Monte Carlo is worth too much to be hazarded for any crooked work of the kind. Hidden in a room above the one where the players assembled, was a man whose job it was to influence the roulette wheel with powerful electric magnets. There were spy-holes in the elaborately frescoed ceiling, through which he could watch the play and see what series of numbers or colours were being staked heavily; and, of course, these invariably lost.

On tw'o occasions only, M. dc Ketchiva tells us, has the bank at Monte Carlo been systematically beaten by legitimate means at its own game, and on each of these occasions the feat was accomplished by an Englishman. The first man to do the; trick was a working engineer named Jaggers, a Tynesider. He employed a number -of clerks to watch all the roulette w'heels in the Casino, and make lists of the winning numbers. Each night he went carefully over these, and found that certain numbers on certain wheels came up more frequently than the law of averages permitted. This meant of course that these particular wheels were fallible, since the law of averages is infallible. Armed with this knowledge he played steadily and methodically for four days, at the end of which period he was £120,000 to the good. Then the Casino Administration somehow got to hear of his system, and changed the wheels about overnight. As a result of this astute move, Jaggers lost £40,000, whereupon, realising that the game was up. he went back to England, taking £BO,OOO of the Casino’s money with him.

The second man was “Monte Carlo Wells, who very nearly succeeded in perfecting an infallible system. If was one of the simplest ever tried there, consisting merely in basing his stakes within 10 points of zero—his contention being that in nine cases out more 10 points either way. In this he was right, as a matter of fact, but after his sensational breaking of the various banks the matter was carefully gone into by experts called in by the Casino Administration, and the reason for this retarded veering of the pendulum was discovered to be a mechanical fault in the construction of the wheels —a fault which, needle&s to say, was promptly rectified. Of course, the bank is never reall> “broken,” all that actually happens being that the sum of money allotted to some particular table has be«n ! exhausted.