Month: November 2018

Baccarat is a gambling game at cards, played by a banker, or dealer, and two patrons who lay stakes against the banker. Regardless of the number of patrons, just two hands – designated the ‘player’ hand and ‘banker’ hand – of two or three cards each are dealt and the object of the game is to bet on the hand that adds up closer to nine. The three possible outcomes are a player win, a banker win and a tie, and patrons can bet on any of these eventualities, but not on a player win and a banker win simultaneously. In the event of a tie, stakes laid on player win and banker win are returned.

For the purposes of calculating the value of each hand, tens and face, or picture, cards have a value of zero, aces have a value of one and cards between two and nine have their face values. Of course, this allows a hand to add up to more than nine but, in that event, the value of the hand is the second digit.

The player hand is concluded before the banker hand. If the player hand has a total between zero and five, unless the bank hand has a total of eight or nine, known as a ‘natural’, the player hand draws a third card. The player hand stands on total values of six and seven and, for obvious reasons, on eight and nine. A natural eight or nine for either hand wins outright, with no further cards drawn, unless the natural eight or nine is tied, or beaten, by the opposing hand. By contrast, while the banker hand always draws another card on values between zero and two and always stands on values between seven and nine, the response to values between three and six depends on the value of the third card in the player hand.

‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’ was a popular British music hall song in the late nineteenth century but, by that stage, half a dozen players had, quite literally, set the bells ringing in the Casino de Monte-Carlo by winning more than the 100,000 franc cash reserve – otherwise known as the ‘bank’ – set aside to cover liabilities on each roulette.

The first man to famously do so was Joseph Jagger, a mechanically-minded, but down-on-his-luck, piece worker from Yorkshire in the North of England. In 1873, working in cahoots with unscrupulous casino staff, Jagger recorded the results of every spin of each roulette wheel at the Casino de Monte-Carlo for a period of weeks. Subsequently, having discovered that one of the wheels displayed a distinct bias towards some numbers rather than others, he began to bet on the frequently-occurring numbers. Over a period of several days, he won 2,000,000 francs, or the equivalent of £7.5 million in modern terms.

Less than two decades later, in 1891, Charles Wells, a known petty criminal born in Hertfordshire in the East of England, but educated at Clermont-Ferrand University in central France, broke the bank at Monte Carlo not once, but several times. Surprisingly, perhaps, given his dubious background, each time he did so by pure good fortune, without resorting to any form of skullduggery, subterfuge, or out-and-out cheating. One the first occasion, when he won 1,000,000 francs, he reportedly won twenty-three of thirty consecutive spins of the roulette wheel and, on his return to Monte Carlo later the same year, he managed to win another 1,000,000 francs from a series of random bets.