Editorial

Tuesday, 28 July 2009 03:47 Last Updated on Tuesday, 28 July 2009 03:56

Gambling is not always the hard and serious business that many people regard it as. There have been big winners and big losers throughout history but there have also been many crazy, off the wall attempts at beating the casinos without relying on the chance factor.

Most attempts were unsuccessful and some even landed the perpetrators in jail. But there are some who actually managed to whip the casinos using ingenuity, guile and cunning to make their own luck. Here we look at five of the most audacious casino winners, past and present.

Credited as being the original "Man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo," Joseph Hobson Jagger, a British engineer was fascinated by the inaccuracies of roulette wheels of the day. In 1873 he travelled to Monte Carlo where he hired six clerks to observe the outcomes of six carefully chosen roulette wheels at the Monte Carlo's Beaux-Arts Casino. He found that one had a bias for several numbers, so over the next three days he played and won an estimated £65,000 which would be worth over £3 million today. Even when the casino owners suspected a ruse and moved the wheels around, Jagger simply found his winning wheel on another table and carried on winning. He left never to return and invested his fortune in property.

One of the most famous and adventurous gambling schemes ever to take Las Vegas by surprise was the blackjack card counting team from MIT that descended upon it's casinos in the early 1990s. Card counting was already a high profile watched for activity by casino security staff, but the MIT team fooled them by posing as ordinary punters and working in a team to throw the security surveillance teams off the scent. They used scouts to play the tables and bet normally while counting the cards. As soon as the card count on a certain table went "hot" the scout would signal a heavy player to join the table and bet big. The system netted the team several million dollars over time until the casinos wised up to the ruse and changed their rules to call and end to the team's fortunes.

London's Ritz Casino is the setting for the next carefully constructed and executed sting. This time four scientists, two from Serbia and two from Hungary had brought with them a high tech solution consisting of lasers, lap top computers, cell phones and scanners. They used their advanced knowledge of mathematics and geometry to work out the angle and speed deployed by the roulette ball. Using the computers they calculated the ball's most probably outcome on each spin of the wheel. They were very successful and in the space of just four hours walked out of the casino with around £1.2 million. The casino sued when they discovered the truth. However the judge ruled that as the roulette wheel wasn't actually tampered with the scientists could keep their winnings.

That was three legitimate ways to whip the casinos. Now for two more methods that employed underhand and outrageous means to obtain the winning goal.

Playing the slots in a casino in Reno, local farmer Fred Kellermann found he's just won the machine's jackpot of $250,000. However, the machine failed to pay out and the farmer went crazy kicking the machine and screaming obscenities. The casino security men naturally ejected him, forcibly. Unrepentant, he returned riding his tractor and drove through the casino's main window. He then chained up a whole bank of slot machines to the tractor and drove off with them, shouting "I'm taking what's mine." Kellermann later found himself in court where the judge fined him $125,000 for the damage he caused. However, the judge then ordered the casino to pay him the jackpot that was rightfully his, so he walked out with a hefty profit.

The last incident involved probably the most audacious casino stunt of them all. It happened in 1992 at the Las Vegas Stardust Casino, where a croupier, Bill Herman was obviously disillusioned with his job and tired of paying out so much money to high rollers while being paid a lowly croupier's wage. One night, he simply filled an ordinary looking brown paper bag with cash and chips to the value of over a half million dollars, then casually walked out of the casino at the end of his shift, saying goodnight to the security personnel as if nothing were out of the ordinary. To this day, Herman is still at large and wanted by the FBI. Chances are he's living the high life somewhere that is well out of reach of the long arm of the law.

These are just five examples of how exceptional people can make exceptional things happen in life. What's more, if they have a penchant for gambling then the casinos had better keep on their toes and be on the lookout for the next one!