RoulettePlaces - The biggest roulette winner of all time
When people are asked to name a classic casino game, roulette77 is often one of the first games mentioned. There’s something about this iconic game of chance that fixes it in people’s minds – many of whom will have never actually played the game themselves. It’s often the first game a new player will play when they join an online casino site. And every site has a choice of roulette variants to try out – check out the range of 32Red casino games which includes a number of different roulette games, as well as other casino classics like blackjack and poker.
It’s the random nature of roulette that is so appealing to players and that goes back all the way through its history, when the game was first played in a casino in Monte Carlo in the 1800s. There have been some spectacular roulette wins during the game’s history, but probably none more so than that of Charles Well, a legendary roulette player and con man.
Wells was an Englishman who went to Monte Carlo in 1891 on the back of a fraudulent invention – (a musical skipping rope) and used the investors’ money to play roulette. He is alleged to be the first person to ‘break the bank’ in a casino setting. This expression means to win more chips at a casino than are available on the table. If and when this happened, play was suspended and the casino would have to get new chips brought up to the table from the reserves.
When Wells played roulette for a solid 11 hours, he ‘broke the bank’ a dozen times and finished having won a million francs. Not only that, but during his mega session, he won 23 successive spins out of 30, a feat that has never been repeated. Francois Blanc, the owner of the casino was suspicious that Wells had used a system to cheat, and hired detectives to watch Wells playing when he returned a few months later. On his second visit, Wells won another million francs – an extraordinary amount of money at the time. This time, his wins included having bet on the number five, five times in succession.
The detectives Blanc employed were unable to find any evidence that Wells had been cheating, but that didn’t mean Wells got off scot-free. He had used another fraudulent invention – this time a fuel-saving device for steamships – to fund his second trip to Monaco and as he travelled back to the UK, he was arrested for fraud at Le Havre and deported to England. Tried at the Old Bailey, Wells was sentenced to eight years in prison. He later served another three years in England and then moved to France. However, his luck didn’t change as he was sentenced to five years in prison there on the back of another financial scam. From being the world’s greatest success story at roulette, Wells went on to die penniless in Paris in 1922.
His is a great story for all gamblers – to aspire to that kind of win, but also to remember you should always know when it’s time to bank your profits and quit!
