GONZALO GARCÍA-PELAYO
Gonzalo García-Pelayo became one of the most feared men in casinos during the 1990s. He and his family became millionaires after developing a pioneering legal system to win at roulette, which later became the subject of a Spanish film “Winning Streak” (Original title: The Pelayos) in 2012.
A Spanish record producer, musician, and filmmaker, Pelayo noticed that certain numbers appeared to come up more often on the roulette wheels and made it his mission to find out why. Over several months he came to believe that imperfections in the construction or maintenance of roulette wheels could lead to certain numbers, or sectors of the wheel, being hit more frequently, resulting in a non-random distribution of outcomes. After recording the results of as many as 30,000 spins at his local casino, the Casino Gran Madrid, over several months, he then used computer analysis and data collection to identify biased or imperfect roulette wheels.
He got his children to help carry out his plan and sent them to other casinos to record data on the roulette wheels. Eventually, the team scooped £1.6m in winnings from Las Vegas, Australia, Denmark, Holland and Austria, after they were banned from Spain and forced to play abroad. He later filed a lawsuit against the Spanish casino that had banned him. In 2004 The Supreme Court ruled that his method of predicting results was legal and that he was using the data to make an educated guess.
Since the 1990s, he and a large part of his family have continued to work in the field of probability in games of chance, studying and developing methods to win in the field of gaming, such as pools and more recently, online poker.
CASINO IMPOSTER SCAM
In July The Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB) disseminated a notice to all licensees to warn of a new scam that was occurring in Nevada and across the country.
According to the NGCB the scam works with a telephone call during which a cage employee is told to withdraw cash from the casino cage and take the funds offsite for emergency payments on behalf of the casino. The imposters often pose as high- level executives. The initial call is frequently followed up with a text message to the employee’s cell phone, purportedly sent by a second manager to confirm the fraudulent instructions, the NGCB warned. The NGCB said that criminal elements gain intelligence on high-level casino owners, employees, managers, and others connected to the casino’s money operations. The fraudsters then contact cage employees using a variety of scenarios to manipulate personnel based on a fear of negative consequences for casino employees.
In June, a cage employee in Circa Hotel in downtown Las Vegas received a call from someone claiming to be an owner of the resort where she worked and ordered her to pay the fire department hundreds of thousands in cash. The supervisor took the money and gave it to an unknown person at a petrol station then did it two more times - totalling $1,170,000 after meeting at different locations for “an emergency payment to the fire department for fire safety devices,” according to police reports.
The caller, who has now been identified as Erik Gutierrez-Martinez, 23, is being held on $45,000 bond for two counts of theft of more than $100,000 and is accused of posing as the owner of the hotel and convincing employees to give him more than $1m in cash. Apparently, four Las Vegas casinos have been hit by this highly sophisticated scam so far.
THE MIT BLACKJACK TEAM
The MIT Blackjack Team was a group of students and alumni from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and other universities, who gained fame for their card- counting techniques in blackjack and their successful exploits in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Their story was later the subject of a book "Bringing Down the House" by Ben Mezrich, which was later adapted into the film “21" in 2008.
Bill Kaplan was one of the co-founders of the team and played a central role in its success during the 1980s. Having read a book on card counting (Edward O. Thorp’s “Beat the Dealer”), Kaplan postponed his entrance to Harvard to make his fortune at gambling in Las Vegas. In 1977, Kaplan took $1,000 and within less than a year had turned it into about $35,000.
Later the leader of a small group of students from MIT, who had dabbled with card counting, overheard him discussing his experiences of playing in Las Vegas. They asked him to train and manage their team.
The team developed sophisticated card- counting strategies and used a combination of teamwork and precise betting techniques to gain an advantage over the casinos in blackjack games. Kaplan acted as one of the team's leaders and organisers, helping to recruit and train team members, manage bankrolls, and coordinate their activities.
In 1992, the team was turned into a Massachusetts Limited Partnership by creating Strategic Investments. The company’s purpose was to raise more funds from interested investors. Strategic Investments would train bright students to card count and gamble and would then send them out to play in casinos.
Under Kaplan's leadership, the MIT Blackjack Team managed to win significant sums of money from various casinos in Las Vegas and around the world.
In June a cage employee in Circa Hotel in downtown Las Vegas
received a call from someone claiming to be an owner of the resort where she worked and ordered her to pay the fire department hundreds of thousands in cash. The supervisor took the money and
gave it to an unknown person at a petrol station then did it two more times - totalling $1,170,000 after meeting at different locations, according to police reports.
P58 WIRE / PULSE / INSIGHT / REPORTS
To avoid detection, the team frequently changed their appearances, used various code names, and employed other techniques to evade casino security.
It came to a gradual end once casinos had identified every single member of the team. Part of the investigative process included using MIT and Harvard yearbooks to determine their identities. Only then did the MIT Blackjack Team finally stop operations and disband.
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