The greatest roulette win of all time

Roulette

Million dollar wins and more are now becoming almost commonplace with so many online gaming sites available and big jackpot lotteries going on all the time. Whatever games you enjoy playing, you can stand to win big bucks every time you go online. Winning is what we all desparately want, and the main aim of any game we play.

Progressive slots account for some of the biggest wins, you can find online casino games here and if you want to go for the big prize games, check out those under the most popular tab. Everyone loves the idea of winning big and you’ll find the progressives are often the most popular games.

If you were to look back over casino history, though, you’d find that one of the biggest roulette wins ever took place a long, long time ago. Though Englishman Ashley Revell made headlines in 2004, when he staked everything he owned and won on number 7 red at the Plaza Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, a gambler called Charles Wells in Monte Carlo won more than a million francs and broke the bank in the process in 1892. Wells’s win in today’s money would put Revell’s very much in perspective – Revell only won $270,000!

Wells was an Englishman who had got himself to Monte Carlo through a con – a fraudulent invention that he’d persuaded people to invest in. He took the money to play roulette and is supposed to be the first gambler to ever ‘break the bank’ at a casino. The term is used for those times that a player wins more chips than are available on the table. When it happens, play is suspended while new chips are fetched from the casino vault.

In his legendary winning session, Wells played roulette for eleven hours straight, and broke the bank not just once, but 12 times. And during this playing period, he also called won successive spins 23 times out of 30, an incredible stroke of luck. The casino owner, Francois Blanc, suspected that Wells was using a system and even hired detectives to watch Wells play a few months later when he returned to the casino. Wells always maintained, though, that the only thing that helped him to win was good luck.

When he played at the same casino the second time, he won another million francs and that time, he won on number five, five times in a row. However, although his casino luck was good, he was arrested on his way back to the UK for fraud – he had again conned investors into backing another non-existent invention. He was deported from France and tried at the Old Bailey, where he was sentenced to eight years in prison. His life entered a downward spiral and he spent the remaining years of his life in and out of prison in England and France, and ended up dying penniless in Paris in 1922.

His is a great story for all gamblers – it’s ok to aspire to that kind of win, but a wise gambler always knows when it’s time to bank their profit and quit!