Who was the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo

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A.� His name was Joseph Jaggers - although the vaudeville song probably pre-dates his achievement at the casino in Monte Carlo in 1873.< xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

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Q.� Who was he

A.� A cotton mill engineer from Yorkshire, who, on his first visit to the casino, thought there might be a mechanical way to predict how the roulette wheels would turn. After all, he thought, he knew how cotton spindles would spin … so he could beat a gambling machine.

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Jaggers hired six clerks to sit at six roulette tables for 12 hours a day and record the numbers that came up. For a week he digested their data. He made a statistical analysis of all six wheels, looking for a pattern, and concluded that one of them showed a positive bias for nine numbers. So, he sat down at the table and in a day won $70,000. He kept going back and by the end of the fifth day had won $300,000.

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Q.� A fantastic sum! What did the casino do

A.� Fought back. That night, casino staff moved the wheels around. The next day Jaggers played the wrong wheel and lost $200,000 before he worked out what had happened. He noticed that the familiar scratch on his lucky wheel was missing, scrutinised the rest and found where it had been moved. He then managed to increase his winnings to $350,000 - probably the equivalent of $20 million today. He then decided that was enough - and left Monte Carlo, never to return.

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Q.� And did the casino learn from this

A.� Oh yes. They had their manufacturer design a set of movable frets - the barriers that separate numbers on the wheel - and each night moved them to a new place around the wheel.

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Q.� And other serious challengers

A.� A few. Between 1904 and 1911, William Nelson Darnborough, of Bloomington, Illinois, won nearly $500,000 there. He, again, was a wheel-watcher. After winning his fortune, he apparently quit playing to marry a beautiful young woman whose family frowned on gambling.�

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And in 1971, Richard Jarecki won $1.28 million at casinos in Monte Carlo and San Remo. Like Jaggers, Jarecki looked for wheels that showed a bias.

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Steve Cunningham

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