Great Gambling Scams. Howard Monte/Nigel Montgomery
a maximum bet he could use the Martingale system and eventually beat the house. But this didn’t help poor Mr Leigh Sr, who didn’t even have the cab fare back to the hotel, let alone the means to get himself and his son back to the UK. Young Norman would never forget the smug look of self-satisfaction on the face of the chubby young casino manager as he stood by the roulette table in his black dinner jacket and bow tie, arms folded, having wiped out the Englishman. It was a look that was to haunt him for years to come.
As if the casino manager’s smirk wasn’t bad enough, Norman then had to suffer the indignity of attending the British Consulate in Nice that very evening and listening to his father tell a pack of lies to the officials there – that they had been robbed at knifepoint by French peasants at the roadside, and needed their fare home and some pocket money provided for them. The helplessness, poverty, despair and humiliation remained deeply engraved on Norman Leigh’s mind and, as soon as they returned to England courtesy of the British Consulate, he dedicated himself to formulating a plan that would enable him to exact his revenge on the Casino Municipale in Nice. He did not care how long it took. Revenge would be sweet, and worth waiting for.
Over the following years, Norman Leigh turned himself into an extraordinary man. Despite having no formal education, he taught himself to speak six or seven languages fluently. He loved taking risks, just like his father – hence his interest in gambling. He always dressed smartly, wore a suit with a white shirt, bow tie or cravat, and – importantly – had an agile mind when it came to mathematics. The size and speed of his father’s loss at the casino in Nice continued to torture his mind, yet he was convinced that there must be a method or system he could devise that would enable him to recover all the money, and more. And so Norman Leigh devoted the bulk of his time in playing around with roulette systems and methods, spending endless hours in casinos and practising on the life-size roulette wheel he had at home. He felt certain in the back of his mind that there must be a method or strategy that could put the house in the same unfortunate position as the punter when a long run or sequence occurred, causing the bank to participate in the role of the player and have them hoping for a break in the run. And, of course, being forced to pay out, just as his father had to, as long as the run continued. How wonderful it would be, he thought, to reach the house limit on a winning streak!
He believed strongly that such a system could be devised, and spent hours experimenting with various staking plans and strategies, but one of the problems he faced was that there were six even-money options on a roulette table, so how was he to choose which one the run would occur on? It could be red or black, high or low, odd or even. One thing struck home during the hundreds of hours of practice spins on his wheel at home. He noted that long sequences – or imbalances, as he preferred to call them – occurred with incredible regularity on many of the even chances. But he had to devise a way of being able to capitalise on such a run, or imbalance, while at the same time protecting his bankroll should such a run not occur. Risk versus reward ratio, to put it bluntly.
For the bulk of the early 1960s, Norman Leigh spent over fifty hours a week practising and refining roulette-staking disciplines. He supported himself during this period by playing roulette for real money, and having the odd bet on a horse or dog he’d received inside information about from his gambling cronies. While he found some success with various perms and systems he devised, he couldn’t convince himself that he had perfected a strategy that would see him through to his final goal, a goal he had now decided simply had to be achieved and which took over enormous importance in his life.
By 1965, he was almost there. But there was still one vital ingredient missing. He had now established – through thousands of practice spins, which he had meticulously logged – that there were indeed long series of imbalances on the even chances at roulette: runs of high numbers outnumbering lows, long streaks of blacks outnumbering reds, large percentages of odds over evens. But he still couldn’t fathom out a staking discipline to take advantage of these imbalances efficiently. Maybe the great Albert Einstein had been right when he said, ‘The only way to win at roulette is to steal the money when the dealer isn’t looking.’ But Norman Leigh wasn’t to be put off.
One day, in the spring of 1965, he decided to go for a stroll to clear his head, and try and think the whole thing through calmly. It was while he was out, taking in the fresh air, that he went back in his mind to the cause of his father’s downfall at roulette all those years earlier. He theorised that the reason so many players lose with ‘Labouchere’ is that they run into the house limits, or lose their playing capital, and are unable to recoup losses. Since the bank has almost unlimited capital in comparison to the players, the bank can out-wait most player assaults, knowing that either the house betting limit or the player’s own limited financial resources will bring about the player’s demise. The Labouchere system was first discovered by Henry Labouchere, an English gambler who travelled the world playing it until he died in 1912. It was the Labouchere system that had caused his father’s downfall, as it meant investing higher and higher amounts, spin by spin, to recoup the losses. Why was it not possible, he wondered, to put the house in the position of ‘Labouchere’, where they had to keep paying out during the run of imbalance? Runs, he was now quite convinced, were not abnormal. Surely he could build a staking discipline that took advantage of these imbalances?
His mind kept wandering back to that Labouchere staking method that had been so costly. And then he got it, in a flash of inspiration. If the Labouchere system was the dangerous and expensive culprit, all he had to do was create a staking system that was the opposite of Labouchere. Or an inversion of it. Leigh reasoned that a reverse-betting strategy was the approach that would most closely resemble the bank’s approach to most other players. He would wait out the small losses until a large win occurred. He rushed back to his home and grabbed his working papers. The solution had been staring him in the face for months. The Reverse Labouchere system was born, and Norman Leigh just couldn’t wait to put what he had discovered to the test.
The Reverse Labouchere roulette system begins with a series of numbers – any you want to use – with each number representing the chip amount you are going to risk. Norman Leigh started with 1-2-3-4-5-6, but later refined it to 1-2-3-4. The size of your wager will always be the sum of the outside two numbers. So in the first example the bet would be 7 chips, and in the second – the one Leigh stuck to – it would be 5. The beauty of the Reverse Labouchere is that, when the bet wins, the size of the wager is added to the end of the sequence, in the first example 7, and the next bet would be for 8 units (1 plus 7). But – and here was the Achilles heel to roulette that Norman Leigh had unwittingly uncovered – if the bet lost, you crossed out two numbers from your sequence from either end, and the next bet became the total of the outside two numbers left. In the first example, then, if the first bet had lost, the numbers 1 and 6 would be crossed out, and the next bet would become 7 units (2 plus 5), and, if this won, a 7 would be added, and if it lost the 2 and 5 would be crossed out. This betting pattern would continue until either all the numbers had been crossed out, in which case you started again, or until such time as the progression lasted until the house limit was reached. When this natural winning streak occurred, the Reverse Labouchere staking system would have dictated maximum payout, and the player would then take down the final winning bet, realising a huge profit (around 6,000 units).
Leigh got out his scribblings of series of roulette numbers he had experienced in real life both in casinos and at home on his practice wheel. He started applying the staking system to the six even-chance outside bets, and added and reduced his stakes according to the outcome of the spin. While there were certain draw downs, and – frustratingly – progressions that looked promising often fizzled out, he was encouraged to see that on several occasions progressions carried on right the way to the mythical table maximum, culminating in a massive payout that more than made up for any of the small and inevitable losses. He spent the next few weeks spinning the wheel, placing the chips and working the Reverse Labouchere system until he was satisfied and convinced that it worked. And work it did: over the course of 100 sessions, 96 were profitable, and some winning sessions were extremely profitable.
Norman Leigh had three problems with the system, though. First, how would he handle the staking plan when a zero came up? Until now he had simply ignored it and carried on, but the more he thought about it, the more he decided it was beneficial in the long run to count