PRINCE AS GAMBLER

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 526, 1 December 1928, Page 6

PRINCE AS GAMBLER

SKILFUL, BUT UNLUCKY ROYAL FLUTTERS Royal personages are by no means lucky at the gambling tables, if the experiences of M. de Ketchiva, for many years a croupier at the European casinos, are worth anything. He declares in his “Confessions of a Croupier" that there are few kings and princes who do not occasionally have a “flutter." “Although,” he says, “the Prince of Wales is a skilful gambler, he is not a lucky one, and it is seldom that he takes away from the tables any substantial sum of winnings. He plays as he hunts—carefully, conscientiously, and sportingly. Rather, he is a pessimist at the gaming tables, for I have seen his face light up with surprise Bordering on amazement when I have pushed winnings toward him, instead of raking away his stakes.” M. de Ketchiva comments that the Prince "always seemed out of place in a casino; he always looked like an Eton boy who had strayed in unwittingly from the free openness of the playiug fields.” prince Henry, he says, is as skilful at chemin de fer as he Is at dancing. Systems to break the bank at Monte Carlo have never been of any use in the 25 years the author has known it. Jaggers was the only man who ever defeated the bank by legitimate means. On the Kaiser’s last visit to the Riviera before the war, he tried a system which he bought from Professor Schott, of Heidelberg University, To the Kaiser’s annoyance, the system promptly lost him 5,000 louis.