The best thing about "How Jones Lost His Roll" are the intertitle cards. Instead of the usual static cards that explain the action, these cards consist of stop-motion letters that dance across the screen and spell out what is occurring in the story. It's very advanced for 1905.
As for the rest of the story, it seems stupid today. Jones is invited to play a friendly game of cards and doesn't realize that his hosts are cheats. While this COULD have been fun and enough to sustain the movie, it wasn't. This is because the cheating was facilitated by having Jones sit directly in front of a GIANT mirror--and only a complete moron would have done this. Any idiot would have known that the other players would have easily been able to read his cards in the mirror. Had the hosts used some clever and believable way to cheat, the film wouldn't have come off as so stupid. Only of interest for the intertitle cards!