A lot of gamblers tried to win consistently with roulette. Some of them got so good at it that they got famous all over the world.
Joseph Jagger
Jagger was a English engeneer who was certain the roulette wheel couldn’t be calibrated perfectly and so some numbers would appear more frequently than others.
In 1873 he travelled to the Monte Carlo Casino and monitored the numbers that won of the roulette tables. After analyzing the outcomes, he saw that certain numbers won often.
In the three days that followed he had won 60,000 pounds, an incredible amount in those days. The casino wasn’t so thrilled as Jagger and started to switch the roulettes with roulettes of other places every once in a while.
It made it more difficult to win and and Jagger went back home. There he quit his job and invested his gathered fortune wisely in property.
The Eudaemon Group
From the time computer technology became available gambling professionals started using it. The Eudaemons were professional gamblers: a group of graduate physics students with the goal of winning money with roulette to fund a scientific society.
After 2 years of scientific research they had developed a small machine that could calculate in which part of the roulette the ball would stop.
In 1978 they travelled to a casino in Vegas to try it out, but they had to quit suddenly because the playing group member received electrical shocks caused by a failure in the device. A real shame: because on every dollar they won about 45%. The group fell apart and made ‘only’ 10,000 dollars.
Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo
In the 1990’s a similar technique was used in the casino of Madrid. Together with some members of his family Gonzalo put bets on the outcome a computer predicted. They went unnoticed for several years and won more than a million dollars.
They were accused of cheating by the casino… and the casino lost the case.
Courageous Roulette Bettor Ashley Revell
A man with a less scientific strategy was the poker pro Revell. In 2004 he sold all his belongings (including clothes) and went to Vegas to double or loose the money on a single game of roulette. The whole experience was broadcasted on British national television.
The spectators of the TV show said he should bet on red… So he did: $135,300 could be won or lost. When the roulette stopped spinning the winning number turned out to be red. With the money won he set up his own poker room.
Also in 2004, a woman and two men won 1.3 million pound in the Ritz Casino. They used a mobile phone with built-in laser to track the ball in the roulette. Soon after they got arrested on suspicion of cheating. But were set free later and got their entire winnings.
