Famous Players

The history of roulette is riddled with stories of players trying to break the house at roulette and make their fortune. Roulette is such a visual game with a rich history and many of these stories have become legends.

Some undoubtedly did make their fortune on the wheel, others lost it. We have pulled together some of our favourite legends and stories about this fascinating casino game below. Hope you enjoy them.

In 1873, an English guy called Joseph Jaggers tried to take on the casinos for the fist time by monitoring imperfections and skews on the casino's roulette wheels. Jaggers hired a team of roulette crackers and monitored all the roulette wheels at the Monte Carlo casino and discovered one with a measurable bias. They scoooped over $325,000, using this information, millions in todays money. Needless to say, the casino shut this particular loophole down pretty quickly.

Then in 1891, again at the Monte Carlo casino, (the most famous of the time) a guy from London called Charles Wells, took on the casino and broke the house, meaning that he won all of the available balance in the casino that day. Known for ever after as "The Man That Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo."

In 2004, ANOTHER guy from London called Ashley Revell sold all of his worldly goods including all the stuff in his wardrobe and stuck $135 grand on the red at the Plaza Hotel casino in Las Vegas. The ball settled in the seven pocket (a red as luck would have it) and the lucky Londoner headed off with double his money ($270 grand).

And these stories don't include the fictional roulette stories. There are plenty of Hollywood films that feature the game. Such as the 1973 movie The Sting, in which Robert Redford (who plays Johnny Hooker in the film) takes his share of the money conned from a numbers runner and loses nearly all of it on a single bet against a rigged roulette wheel.