Breaking the Bank
Written February 18, 2008 by Jack Jones
There are certain gamblers who try breaking the bank every time they walk into the casino, but where did this term come from? We here at BetFirms went looking for the answer so let us give you a little history lesson for those of you interesting in knowing more about casino terminology. There have been rumors that this term came from some misbehaving roulette wheel that paid out a ton of money to a person who figured out the malfunction and sat there to take advantage of it. We went to investigate whether this was the true basis for the term. The answer was found in Kevin Blackwood’s Casino Gambling for Dummies, where on page 160, Kevin explains that in Monte Carlo way back in 1873 there was an Englishmen named Joseph Jagger who found that a biased roulette wheel was putting forth nine numbers more than sheer randomness would expect. He took full advantage of this error before the pit bosses figured out the mistake and he walked away with nearly $350,000 in a single day. That is more than $5.6 million in 2006 dollars to give you an idea of how the bank was broke at Monte Carlo that day.
This may have been the first case of breaking the bank, but it became memorable from other sources. If a gambler wins more than the chips that exist on the table then this is what is meant by “blown up the bank.” When this happens then a black shroud is placed over the table until the reserve chips can be brought over to the game. When it comes to roulette, this is a feat that we have never personally witnessed and would be a truly rare occurrence indeed.
A public relations ploy by the Monte Carlo casino wanted to get some action out of the greedy general public back in the late 1800s, so he found a guy who had won a ton of money. However, with the amount of play going on in the casino this was just as much a luck factor as some malfunction of the wheel, but he had a newspaper reporter put a press release out about people breaking the bank at his casino. Obviously upon reading this article there were plenty of patrons who had gold in their eye, but ended up leaving with nothing but lint in their pockets as they tried to make their dreams come true with just one spin of the wheel.