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in 1994, I happened to be watching TV when I saw an interview that
greatly intrigued me. Someone was talking to a middle-aged man named
Gonzalo García Pelayo, who had won 2 million dollars over 2
years, playing casino roulette. Knowing that there is no mathematical
system than can achieve this, I was curious to hear
how he did it. The
interview being short, he didn’t talk about the details of
his method on the show, so I wanted to meet him personally. Knowing a man who had friends at that particular TV station, I managed to get Gonzalo’s telephone number, and called him the next day. Gonzalo is a friendly guy, and is an extremely creative person. Before becoming a gambler, he was a movie director, and also a music producer, among other things. Extremely quick-, but also practical minded, he was very good at mathematics, especially the area of probability. He invited me to visit him at his home in Madrid, and of course, I accepted readily! When I arrived, we sat down in his living room, and I asked him the obvious question: how did he ever manage to beat casinos throughout the world with some sort of system? He told me at once that he didn’t use the normal mathematical type of system (Martingale, d’Alembert, etc.). He said that such methods were sure to ruin you before long. However, he said he had thought of a way it could be done… Gonzalo had a very simple idea: roulette wheels are basically machines, and not all machines – of any type – are perfect. Therefore, he reasoned, if a casino has, for instance, 40 roulette wheels, the chances are that at least one, or maybe two, of them are not perfectly balanced. Of course, he was not implying that this imbalance was “planned” by the casino; the casino would not even realize it. But, he said, if one were to do a statistical study over time, taking notes on the results of many thousands of spins of each wheel in a particular casino, after a few months, one could do some probability calculations, and determine whether any one of the wheels were giving results that were not totally balanced. Of course, doing this would be a lot of work. Here’s how he went about it… *** The Spaniard Gonzalo García Pelayo is one of the cleverest people I have ever met. Former movie director, successful music producer, and most famous gambler in his country, his is a mind both highly creative, as well as clear and mathematical. Back in the early 90s, over a period of two years, he won two million dollars playing casino roulette, using mathematics to do so. No, not a mathematical “system” of the sort that is sold at many an internet site, but rather, by discovering an “additional element” of the game, one that is not part of the theoretical framework of how roulette is conceived. Gonzalo’s idea (one that had been successfully used by someone else back in the 1920’s, though I’m not sure whether Gonzalo knew this or not) was that since roulette wheels are machines, and since not all machines are perfect, then one could expect that, in any large group of roulette wheels, there is probably at least one that is not perfectly balanced, though even the casino itself wouldn’t be aware of this. The problem, of course, was how to find out which wheel was the one that didn’t deliver purely random results? There was only one way to discover this: statistics, and a lot of hard work. Gonzalo devised the following plan. Working together with several family members – I believe he had a group of five people initially, including himself – they decided that they would take turns visiting the casino in Madrid. The casino was open, as I recall, 20 hours a day. One of the family would go to the casino, and take notes on all the results at all the roulette tables in the casino. (Each table has a lit panel that gives the results of the previous 15 games.) I don’t quite remember how many tables there were that offered single-zero roulette (double-zero was ruled out by the Pelayos from the beginning, due to the lessened odds of winning), but let’s say there were 30 of them. The goal was to collect thousands of results from each table, over the course of the months. If one table yielded, for example, 500 results in a day, then it would be necessary to observe and collect data for twenty days in order to obtain 10,000 results, forty days for 20,000. The more results, the better, as far as the statistical analysis was concerned. After a few grueling months of this sort of work – a task that most people would have soon given up, due to its boring nature – they had indeed collected many thousands of results for each table. Gonzalo then put the results into a computer program, to determine whether any of the tables was producing results that were not “balanced”. He did indeed find such a one… Gonzalo explained all of this to me many years ago (in 1994, to be exact), so you’ll forgive me if I don’t quite remember all the details. I believe that initially, he found two tables that weren’t perfect, but for now, I’ll assume it was only one. He discovered that at one table, the number seven (to give a number; I don’t recall in fact what the number was) was occurring significantly more than probability would predict. Now, the path was clear… Continue wiith Part 2 of "Conversations with an amazingly successful Gambler" Curious about what your personalized "Fortune Smiling" three-month Predictive Finance Graph Report might reveal about your upcoming financial future? Order now for only $19.95* (a $69.95 value!), with our no-risk, money-back guarantee. Click here to order Finance Graph Report. |