Norman Leigh and the Reverse Labouchere
This one really can’t be called a scam, because there was no cheating involved. But, historically, it has been deemed as such. In 1966, Norman Leigh trained 12 laymen to take down the roulette tables in Nice, Casino Municipale. The team managed to rake in $183,000 in a span of two weeks at the French casinos before getting banned.
Leigh and his men didn’t cheat or misbehave. Instead, they consistently won so much that the casinos had to kick them out for fear of losing too much money. The story hit the papers of Leigh, who had two teams of six people, with each one betting on even chance bets like odd/even, red/black and 1-18/19-36. Leigh later came out with a book about his exploits called “Thirteen Against The Bank.”
So, how did he do it? Leigh claimed that if he took the easiest betting system with which to lose money in roulette, the Labouchere, and reversed it, he would have the system with the best chance of winning. When using the Labouchere, a player writes down a series of numbers such as 1, 2, 3, 4. You bet a number equal to the sum of the first and last numbers, which would be 5 in this example. If you win, you cross off the outside numbers, giving you 2, 3 as your remaining line. If 5 doesn’t win, you add that to the line, making is 2, 3, 5 and a bet of 7. You do this until you run out of numbers in the line, hit the table limit or run out of money. Leigh reversed the system and coined it the Reverse Labouchere, or Reverse Labby. This system added numbers to the line after a won, not after a loss. This allowed the group to capitalize on winning streaks.
Leigh was the smartest man in the story. The winning runs from the group were placed into a special account. Leigh took a 10% cut and the rest was split among the group, regardless of how much each individual player won. Leigh gained $18,300 without risking any of his own money.
Tags: Casino Municipale, labouchere, norman leigh, onlineroulette.net, reverse labouchere, roulette, roulette betting system, roulette cheat, roulette odds, roulette scam, roulette strategy, roulette system, Thirteen Against The Bank