There are many stories and myths that circulate the game of roulette- that´s half of its appeal. The game has been enjoyed by chancers for centuries now- so it should come as no suprise to hear that there is a long list of people who have tried to crack the roulette code and take the casinos on at roulette.
Of course, this gets harder, and harder, as the casinos learn from their mistakes and they iron out any flaws in their system every time they lose out to a clever player. And one of the big flaws they needed to fix in the game of roulette was discovered by a roulette legend called Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo.
This man was a roulette fanatic and it stood him in good stead during his roulette "career". Estimates on his lifetime profit stand at around $1.5 million (and that´s significantly more in today´s money).
Watch The Man in Action in "Breaking Vegas" Above.
Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo was a (not very successful) Spanish record producer, whose fortunes took a distinctly rosier shine when he chanced upon a secret about roulette - wheel bias. Well, many people had a inkling about wheel bias but Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo had a foolproof method of measuring it and increasing his odds on the back of it. He worked with his family of 5 kids and set to work playing the casinos at their own game firstly in Madrid and eventually in Las Vegas. In the early 90s, Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo was certain that casino roulette wheels were not perfectly random, and that they had not kept up to date with the technology available to monitor this skew or bias. He recorded the results and analysed them with a computer, and managed to gain an edge on the house by forecasting that certain numbers were more likely to drop in than others giving a probability higher than the 1-in-35 payout offered by the house. He cleaned up at the Casino de Madrid in Madrid, Spain, winning € 600 grand in a single night , and € 1,000,000 in total.
Well How Did He Do It Then? Cut to The Chase For Pete´s Sake...
Well, Garcia-Pelayo was not your average roulette Joe. In the early 90s, this Madrid "gato" or "cat" discovered that certain roulette wheels were not completely random, but were biased due to tiny imperfections or flaws in the roulette wheel's gears, small differences in the pocket sizes, or because they weren´t mounted perfectly horizontally: so some numbers came up more often than others. Garcia-Pelayo analysed in fine detail the statistical distribution of the wheel across thousands of spins, and hundreds of sessions and then built up a profile of the wheel with "hot spots" based on this raw data.
By betting on his "hot numbers" Garcia-Pelayo turned a 5% house edge into a 15% player edge. And what´s that worth? Well..alot of money. Around €2 million
The casino tried to get its money back through legal action, but the courts ruled in favour of Gonzalo arguing that it was their responsibility to fix their wheel. Spain's Supreme Court also ruled against the casino when it sought to ban the successful roulette player. 10 years of litigation ended in 2004 (Spanish courts are slow!), when the court ruled that Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo, a mathematician and record producer, had not cheated and that the Casino de Madrid could not deny him entry.
The casino banned Garcia-Pelayo in 1992. The Supreme Court in Spain ruled that Garcia-Pelayo and his family used "ingenuity and computer techniques. That's all."
Unfortunately, word spread about the Spanish Roulette Wizard around the casino community and the Pelayos' assault on roulette became a complex hit and run game between Gonzalo and his family and the casinos.
Our VERDICT? True! There are too many witnesses for this one to be a myth.
