Court backs gambler (original) (raw)

Spain's Supreme Court has ruled against a casino that sought to bar a fabulously successful roulette player who used a number-crunching system to predict where the ball would land.

Ending 10 years of litigation, 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.

Working with a group of colleagues, Pelayo's trick was to write down the winning numbers of myriad roulette games, then have a computer digest them. The idea was that roulette wheels had tiny construction flaws, such as tilts, that favour certain numbers over others.

The casino, which denied entry to Garcia-Pelayo in 1992, was overruled by the government in 1994 and had been seeking ever since to reimpose the ban.

Garcia-Pelayo's crew won more than one million euros ($A1.77 million) from the Madrid casino, including 600,000 euros ($A1.06 million) in one day, the newspaper El Pais reported.

The Supreme Court ruling said Garcia-Pelayo and company used "ingenuity and computer techniques. That's all."

It added that the casino, rather than expel big winners, should adjust their roulette wheels or design new ones.

The casino declined to comment on the ruling.

- AP