Richard Jarecki

Unlikely roulette gambler who took casinos to the cleaners

Many gamblers see roulette as a game of pure chance — a wheel is spun, a ball is released and winners and losers are determined by luck.

Richard Jarecki refused to believe it was that simple.

He became the scourge of European casinos in the 1960s and early ′70s by developing a system to win at roulette. And win he did, by many accounts accumulating more than £1 million, or more than £6 million in today’s money — until the casinos finally found a way to eliminate his edge.

But no matter. By then he had filled his pockets, achieved a level of celebrity, and was on his way to carving out a career in another arena of risky wagering in the United States, as a commodities futures trader.

He died on July 25 at his home in Manila. He was 86. His wife, Carol Jarecki, said the cause was pneumonia.

Richard Wilhelm Jarecki was not the sort of rakish bon vivant that might come to mind as the epitome of a gambler. He was a married medical doctor and researcher at Heidelberg University in Germany. The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia described him in 1969 as “rather tall and slim and reedy – looking just like a professor should, complete with a rumpled suit and a bewildered look”.

That look concealed a keen eye for detail and a sharp mathematical mind, which Jarecki first turned to roulette in Germany in the early 1960s.

He and his wife honed his technique at dozens of casinos, including in Monte Carlo; San Remo, on the Italian Riviera and, briefly, Las Vegas. He became a regular in San Remo, where he had lucrative runs over several years.

By 1969 he had become “a menace to every casino in Europe,” Robert Lardera, the San Remo casino’s managing director, told The Morning Herald. “I don’t know how he does it exactly, but if he never returned to my casino I would be a very happy man.”

At the time, Jarecki told reporters that he had cracked roulette with the help of a powerful computer at the University of London. But the truth was more prosaic. He accomplished his improbable lucky streak through painstaking observation.

Carol Jarecki said that she, her husband and a handful of other people helping them would record the results of every turn of a given roulette wheel to discover its biases, or tendency to land on some numbers more frequently than others, usually because of a minute mechanical defect caused by shoddy manufacturing or wear and tear.

Carol Jarecki said that watching, or “clocking,” a wheel, as Barnhart described it, could mean observing more than 10,000 spins over as long as a month. Sometimes a wheel would yield no observable advantage. But when Richard Jarecki and company did find a wheel with a discernible bias, he would have an edge over the house.

“It isn’t something he invented,” Carol Jarecki said. “It’s something he perfected.”

Choosing the right casino was as important as finding the right wheel. Roulette in European casinos offered better odds than US casinos because wheels in Europe have 37 numbered slots, while US wheels have 38.

Some European casinos tried to end Jarecki’s streaks by switching wheels from table to table, but his memory could thwart them. He had memorised nicks, scratches and other telltale identifiers and could still recognise the ones he should play.

Steady losses tormented the San Remo casino, especially as others began betting with Jarecki. His wife said that at one point Italian officials tried to keep them from entering the country. But they successfully appealed and were back at the casino in a few months.

“If casino managers don’t like to lose, they should sell vegetables,” Richard Jarecki told The New York Times in an article in 1969.

When he returned to San Remo he ran the table again until management replaced two dozen roulette wheels, negating his advantage. Moreover, roulette wheels came to be manufactured more carefully, offering fewer biases to exploit, and Richard Jarecki’s edge began to ebb.

He returned to the US in 1974 and began trading commodities futures on his own, specializing in silver and gold. In the 1980s he was named a governor of Comex, a commodities futures exchange.

He also continued to play roulette, as well as blackjack, in Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

Richard Jarecki was born to Jewish parents, Dr Max and Gerda (Kunstmann) Jarecki, on December 1, 1931, in Stettin, Germany. His father was a dermatologist, and his mother’s family owned a major shipping company. But with the rise of the Nazis, they fled Germany in the late 1930s, ultimately settling in the US.

He grew up in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and then studied at Duke University before returning to Germany to earn his medical degree at the University of Heidelberg in 1958.

Jarecki met Carol Fuhse, an anaesthetist, during a medical residency at a hospital in New Jersey. They married in 1964.

In 1967 they moved to Germany where he studied electrophoresis at the University of Heidelberg when he was not at the casino.

In addition to his wife, with whom he also had a home in Las Vegas, he is survived by a brother, Henry, a billionaire psychiatrist, commodities trader and entrepreneur; two daughters, Divonne Holmes a Court and Lianna Jarecki; a son, John, a chess prodigy who became a master at 12; and six grandchildren.

Two nephews of Richard Jarecki are the award-winningdocument arians andrew Jarecki (Capturing the Friedmans and the HBO series The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst) and Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight and The House I Live In).

Jarecki moved to Manila about 20 years ago because he liked the lifestyle and preferred the city’s casinos to those run by Americans.

His touch endured until nearly the end. Carol Jarecki said he last played roulette in December at a tournament in Manila. He came in first. DANIEL E SLOTNIK

“I don’t know how he does it exactly, but if he never returned to my casino I would be a very happy man”