Gonzalo Garcia Pelayo is another who has taken advantage of wheel bias to create his
fortune, but for Pelayo it 🫰 became something of a family business.
The Spanish national
was born in 1947, and his initial interest was film. He studied 🫰 at film school in the
60s but actually ended up working in radio, then moving across into record
producing.
He had 🫰 a whole career in the entertainment industry before he became
interested in roulette, convinced that a man made object such 🫰 as the roulette wheel
could not be truly unbiased.
It was the early 90s when he began looking into this
seriously, 🫰 coming to the conclusion that even millimetre differences between pockets,
slight imperfections in the gears that spin the wheel, and 🫰 even a slightly unlevel
floor could all create wheel bias.
Of course, Garcia needed to prove these theories
before he began 🫰 staking any real money on roulette, so he started visiting the Casino
Gran Madrid and recorded the results of thousands 🫰 of spins on the wheels there.
Two of
his children, Ivan and Vanessa, were brought onboard to help him at this 🫰 stage, because
the data they were collecting was specific to each wheel. That meant more than one pair
of eyes 🫰 were needed.
Together, they collecting over 30,000 results, and once they had
enough information the data was painstakingly fed into a 🫰 computer specially built by
Garcia to analyse the results.
The computer could then tell him which numbers or areas
of the 🫰 wheel more most likely to come up on a spin.
Confident in what he had found,
Garcia worked out that wheel 🫰 bias gave him a 6% edge over the house, and was ready to
put some money down.
Pelayo was starting with 🫰 a bank roll of justR$2,200, and he knew
he would suffer losing streaks along the way, so he still needed 🫰 a little luck as his
strategy was only going to be successful over the long term.
Initially lady luck evaded
him, 🫰 and he ended up losing half of his bank roll, but he persevered, gaining ground
and eventually building his bankroll 🫰 enough to set his family to work on other tables
in the same casino.
They would sometimes visit 6 times a 🫰 week, each person playing the
biased numbers specific to their wheel, and by splitting the bankroll they also drew
less 🫰 attention while still making profit.
Eventually they had enough to increase their
stake size, and after just a few months that 🫰 initialR$2,200 was worth more
thanR$100,000.
The casino did eventually cotton on, and tried a few things to stop the
Pelayo’s winning 🫰 streak; they ordered the dealers to spin the ball faster, made
accusations of cheating, and even tried switching the wheels 🫰 between tables, but the
family by now knew them so well that they could tell the wheels apart.
In the end, 🫰 the
matter was settled in court, with the casino’s attempts to ban the family thrown out by
the Spanish Supreme 🫰 Court, who found that wheel bias was a form of advantage play and
not cheating.
The wheels were eventually changed and 🫰 so the bias was gone, but not
before Garcia and his family had banked more thanR$1 million of the casino’s
🫰 money.
With their plans scuppered at home, it was time for the Pelayo family to hit the
road. They set off 🫰 on something of a European tour of casinos, starting off in
Amsterdam where they racked upR$400,000 over 4 months before 🫰 eventually being
discovered.
They hit a personal best in Vienna when they wonR$110,000 in a single
night, but things were getting 🫰 trickier for the family as the casino industry began
warning each other about the group.
This meant that they were sometimes 🫰 asked to leave
a casino only a few hours after first entering a new venue, making it almost impossible
to 🫰 track results and discover any bias let alone take advantage of it.
The pressure of
their enterprise took its toll and 🫰 a few members of the family decided to call it quits
and head home, exhausted by the stress and from 🫰 being away from home for so long.
Those
who remained decided to leave Europe behind and try their luck in Las 🫰 Vegas, and this
is where things finally got too much.
American tables had an extra zero, making it more
difficult to 🫰 get a significant edge and make money, not to mention the increased
security measures over there. Nonetheless, the group managed 🫰 to bag anotherR$500,000
before the head of the family, Garcia himself, finally succumbed to the pressure and
collapsed.
This was a 🫰 clear sign for them to stop, which they did, heading back to
Spain to enjoy a more relaxed lifestyle for 🫰 a while.
A conservative estimate puts the
family’s totally earnings by the time they had finished at more thanR$2 million.
He
might 🫰 have finished with roulette, but Garcia was a statistician and maths geeks, so he
couldn’t keep away from this sort 🫰 of thing for long.
He eventually turned his hand to
pools betting and then poker, sticking to the world of probability 🫰 in games of
chance.
He also went back into film making after a 30 year hiatus, and he was the
inspiration 🫰 behind another, Winning Streak. This 2012 movie was originally called The
Pelayos, and was released to lukewarm reviews to put 🫰 it politely.
His escapades were
also the topic of a documentary and a book.
In 2024, he launched a company called
Mind.Capital, 🫰 a software platform that buys and sells crypto currencies.
