A man won over $1 million across two years on a roulette table with one spin landing him over $600,000.
In the early 1990s, Gonzalo García-Pelayo got a group together made up of his friends and family and started to analyse the roulette wheels at Casino Gran Madrid in Spain.
Numbered 0 to 36, the roulette wheels have 37 slots which theoretically gives you a one in 37 chance of winning but García-Pelayo questioned whether some numbers come up more frequently than others.
He noticed there were certain imperfections with the wheels which meant some numbers won as often as every 28 throws as opposed to 36.
So, García-Pelayo used sophisticated computer modelling techniques and worked out which numbers were more likely to occur and ended up winning a whopping 600,000 euros ($624,850) in one single day and over a million euros in total.
However, the casino ended up taking legal action against him.
In 1994 the casino realised what García-Pelayo and his friends had been doing, subsequently banning them from the venue.
The case was taken to court where a 10-year long battle ensued and a judge later ruled García-Pelayo had not cheated and the casino must open its doors back up to him.
However, he resolved to not go back as was ‘too well known’ after the whole debacle.
And García-Pelayo isn’t the only one to have taken advantage of a flaw in the system either.
A mechanic named Joseph Jagger was working in a casino when he realised a wheel had a certain bias to the numbers: 7,8,9,17,18,19,22,28 and 29.
He spread out his bets and over the course of just several days he ended up winning a whopping two million francs, Bettors Insider reports.
Richard Jarecki also noticed a wheel in a European roulette had a certain favouritism towards a few numbers and ended up hedging his bets and winning big over the course of several years, switching casinos too to avoid getting caught, amassing over $1 million.
However, similarly to García-Pelayo, some casinos clocked on and soon banned him from ever returning.
And well, Ashley Revell took a slightly different approach, fully deciding to let it be the luck of the draw, selling off everything he owned and betting his entire life savings on a single roulette spin – I guess that’s one way to do it.
