A scene from The Pelayos, with the actors Lluís Homar and Daniel Brühl seated at the table.
Gonzalo García-Pelayo's winning racehorse 😆 is named Going Wrong, and bets are 12 to 1 just before the race at the tracks in Cheltenham, UK. 😆 The 450 euros that he has put down on the jockey in the green-striped shirt is part of a "private 😆 investment fund" which relies on tipsters and earns him a 30-percent annual return. Just then, his cellphone vibrates: it's a 😆 text from another tipster. In the match between Fernando Verdasco and Juan Martín del Potro, he should bet against the 😆 Argentinean tennis player winning more than four games against the Spaniard. García-Pelayo then explains that he is in the process 😆 of creating a new formula for tennis bets based on the theory that if the pre-match favorite favorite loses the 😆 first set, he or she will win the second. If his studies prove conclusive, he will program it on his 😆 computer, under "Favorite loses first set" so it automatically launches.
The race starts at Cheltenham. García-Pelayo leans back on his office 😆 chair, watching the screen with the remote in his hand. It's mid-afternoon on a Tuesday in March, and the gambler 😆 is dressed in cords and checkered shirt. His white beard and hair are disheveled, his reading glasses hang from his 😆 neck. His desk is covered in several layers of dust and papers scribbled with formulas and numbers - their degree 😆 of yellowing is a like a scale that reflects the strata of his life as a gambler.
This is more or 😆 less the position in which he spends his days at home in Madrid, although he does inch closer to the 😆 screen in order to determine the exact placement of his horse (Going Wrong seems to be in third place, maybe 😆 second; it's hard to tell on the small screen).
At times he gets up to check the other four computers he 😆 has placed in various rooms in his house. They are all buzzing with their own activity, offering players from all 😆 over the planet bets that he has programmed. An electronic cry of "Goal!" can be heard every so often from 😆 one of them, announcing a new development in the ongoing Debrecen-Kaposvár game in the Hungarian League. The software immediately updates 😆 itself, offering 2.6/1 that it will be four-goal match. Soccer is the axis upon which García-Pelayo's private fund rotates. His 😆 computers offer 200 bets daily, from which he expects to earn some 15,000 euros a month, part of which will 😆 go to the investors and the remainder to a retirement fund. It took him a year to study how and 😆 what to program: "a degree in sports betting," he calls it. Though he will be 65 in June, there are 😆 a lot of unexplained gaps on his résumé.
Gonzalo García-Pelayo posing with his wife and children on working vacations in Las 😆 Vegas.
Gonzalo is the patriarch of the Pelayo clan, a family who shot to fame in the 1990s for designing a 😆 statistical-based method for winning on the roulette wheel. According to the family's estimates, they won some 250 million pesetas (1.5 😆 million euros) between 1991 and 1995, mainly in the Madrid Gran Casino - their "greatest enemy" but also the "laboratory" 😆 in which they tested their system. So Gonzalo and his son Iván wrote in La fabulosa historia de los Pelayo 😆 (or, The fabulous history of the Pelayos), published by Plaza y Janés.
Their discovery was accidental. Gonzalo had sent his nephew 😆 to the casino to learn the ways of the croupiers. He wanted to study their "ways of dropping" in the 😆 hopes of determining a pattern in the path, bounces and final resting place of the ball. His nephew took down 😆 numbers and dealers' names; Gonzalo analyzed the data on a program on his computer. That was when he discovered that 😆 some numbers come up a lot more often than others, a tendency that had nothing to do with the dealer 😆 and everything to do with defects in the manufacture and leveling of the tables. His hypothesis: "If Swiss watches and 😆 NASA rockets have imperfections, then so do roulette wheels."
His computers offer 200 bets daily; he expects to earn €15,000 a 😆 month
These were the times of the get-rich-quick schemes, of the Seville Expo and the Barcelona Olympics. The patriarch decided to 😆 try his luck at roulette following a series of business failures, he recalled recently in an interview along with his 😆 children, Iván and Vanessa. He has tried his hand at most everything: from radio announcer to matador manager. In the 😆 1970s, he had a go at the movie industry. His second movie, Vivir en Sevilla (or Living in Seville, 1979) 😆 received the following review from critic Fernando Trueba: "Clumsy dialogue and too calculatedly avant-garde."
Next, García-Pelayo opened a nightclub in Seville, 😆 where as DJ, he played Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa. He went underground after a judicial order closed the establishment 😆 down on rumors that minors were using drugs in its backrooms. He moved onto the recording industry, discovering artists such 😆 as Triana and María Jiménez. In total, he left his signature on some 130 albums, including some by Luis Eduardo 😆 Aute, Gato Pérez and Joaquín Sabina. The latter singer dedicated a few lines to García-Pelayo in his well-known song, 19 😆 días y 500 noches (or, 19 days and 500 nights), including: "Yesterday, the doorman threw me out of the Torrelodones 😆 casino."
García-Pelayo branched out into producing TV programs, and had a few hits, but he shut down his company after he 😆 was accused of fleeing to Brazil, he says, and by that point, they were no longer taking his calls in 😆 the music world. So he started looking for a new gig, "beyond the limits of luck," as he calls it.
After 😆 his first few hypotheses on roulette tendencies, García-Pelayo formed a team led by his son, Iván, a recent philosophy graduate 😆 and musician (he composed Africanos en Madrid (or, Africans in Madrid)). There wasn't anybody over 26 years old in the 😆 first group. Though the figures and dates are now blurred, as often occurs in legends, after a "few months" recording 😆 numbers and working with the data, betting began in earnest in the fall of 1991. According to the book, they 😆 won close to "a million pesetas a day" in the first month. They played every day, from 5pm to closing. 😆 "A blue-collar job, not at all glamorous, with 12-hour days," says Iván. "And on your feet the whole time," adds 😆 his sister, Vanessa.
They are interrupted by the sound of their father's cellphone ringing - the Beatles' Eleanor Rigby is the 😆 ring tone, and he comments that he would like to see a movie which portrays his clan like the Liverpool 😆 quartet, with "producer Phil Spector hovering in the background." That role is actually played by actor Lluís Homar, the spitting 😆 image of García-Pelayo. And the preceding scenes, or a version of them, kick off the The Pelayos by director Eduard 😆 Cortés (the movie premieres on April 27). "We are the Pelayos, and we have the opportunity to do something extraordinary: 😆 break the bank in a casino," says actor Daniel Brühl (Good Bye, Lenin!) in the role of Iván.
"This is a 😆 classic story: the dream of a handful of social pariahs whose rival is big business," enthuses the director, who fell 😆 under the family's magnetic spell after living with them for a period.
If Swiss watches and NASA rockets have flaws, then 😆 so do roulette wheels"
Though the film mixes fact and fiction, the script accurately reflects the clan's hostility toward the managers 😆 of the Torrelodones casino. "Every great feat has a great enemy," say the Pelayos today (and in the book: "We 😆 relish our detestation for the casino managers in the way that a boxer finds strength in his hate for his 😆 opponent"). The family was involved in long-drawn-out court case against these executives that started when they were kicked out of 😆 the establishment in 1992 for committing what the casino termed "gaming irregularities." The battle ended with a Supreme Court sentence 😆 in 1994 that recognized the legitimacy of the Pelayos' methods and even praised their "inventiveness."
The bad guy in the movie 😆 is a malicious casino manager called La Bestia (The Beast), played by Eduard Fernández. The movie doesn't say which casino 😆 he works for, but all of this attention has understandably caused concern (and anticipation) among management at the Madrid casino, 😆 who were not consulted by the movie's scriptwriters.
"We don't have anything against anybody," says the casino's communications director, his voice 😆 mingling with the sounds of chips falling in the European Room at Torrelodones. "The Pelayos really are not part of 😆 our everyday conversations around here. They represent just another story among the more than 18 million visitors we get here. 😆 We looked into whether they had some sort of advantage over the other players, and we fixed the imperfections in 😆 the tables."
He tiptoes around the subject of the expulsions. He doesn't know what the family's total winnings amounted to. He 😆 says they never - "no way" - broke the bank. Jesús Marín, pit boss in the time of Pelayos, and 😆 current games director, adds, "They never played a lot of numbers, and they always played the same ones. They usually 😆 won, but their story has been exaggerated. It was immediately discovered that the roulette tables had a pattern; so first 😆 the wheels were switched from one table to another, then the entire tables were replaced. They played three or four 😆 weeks in total."
We have the chance to do something extraordinary: break the bank in a casino"
One former croupier, who prefers 😆 to remain anonymous, remembers that the Pelayos' winning streak happen to coincide with a labor dispute between management and staff 😆 over an annual 2.6 billion pesetas in tips, complete with full and partial strikes throughout the year. "There was a 😆 lot of confusion and some things went unnoticed. That probably was a factor. One of the tables, table 13 or 😆 14, was in bad shape. The wheel hadn't been properly leveled, and they discovered this by watching and taking notes. 😆 That is where they had their big wins, about 100 million pesetas. But their method never worked as well in 😆 other casinos."
The book mentions other wins in Vienna (14 million pesetas in one night), Amsterdam (almost 13 million) and 40 😆 million in Lloret de Mar, where the movie was filmed. But apart from one old Casio calculator, little physical evidence 😆 of this past remains today in the penumbra of Gonzalo's bedroom. After being repeatedly thrown out of the Torrelodones casino, 😆 he continued to visit the its roulette tables through his string of "underground" players, which included Luis Mazarrasa, a journalist 😆 who later published his story in EL PAÍS. There is something about the Pelayo clan that causes one to suffer 😆 a slight case of the Stockholm Syndrome. They welcome every visitor as if he or she may be the beginning 😆 of something new; there is a half-carved ham leg in the kitchen, and something about the smell of the house 😆 and the bookshelves full of movies and albums activates that part of your brain where memories of childhood are stored.
Beyond 😆 this, there is the money. Mazarrasa recalls winning 1.8 million pesetas (just over 10,000 euros) in three days. García-Pelayo's team 😆 broke up in 1995, when he set up an illegal poker establishment. That's another story - maybe another movie. At 😆 the end of his roulette adventures, García-Pelayo had a stash of over 60 million pesetas. But money doesn't last long 😆 in the hands of a gambler and travel lover. "For Easter holidays, I will only have whatever I get out 😆 of these bets. I live day to day," he says. It is still Tuesday when his winning horse, Going Wrong, 😆 finishes ninth, Verdasco loses more than four games to Del Potro, and the cry of "Goal!" continues to be heard 😆 from the other computers.
