Gonzalo García-Pelayo's winning racehorse is named Going Wrong, and bets are 12 to 1 just before the race at the 😊 tracks in Cheltenham, UK. The 450 euros that he has put down on the jockey in the green-striped shirt is 😊 part of a "private investment fund" which relies on tipsters and earns him a 30-percent annual return. Just then, his 😊 cellphone vibrates: it's a text from another tipster. In the match between Fernando Verdasco and Juan Martín del Potro, he 😊 should bet against the Argentinean tennis player winning more than four games against the Spaniard. García-Pelayo then explains that he 😊 is in the process of creating a new formula for tennis bets based on the theory that if the pre-match 😊 favorite favorite loses the first set, he or she will win the second. If his studies prove conclusive, he will 😊 program it on his computer, under "Favorite loses first set" so it automatically launches.
The race starts at Cheltenham. García-Pelayo leans 😊 back on his office chair, watching the screen with the remote in his hand. It's mid-afternoon on a Tuesday in 😊 March, and the gambler is dressed in cords and checkered shirt. His white beard and hair are disheveled, his reading 😊 glasses hang from his neck. His desk is covered in several layers of dust and papers scribbled with formulas and 😊 numbers - their degree of yellowing is a like a scale that reflects the strata of his life as a 😊 gambler.
This is more or less the position in which he spends his days at home in Madrid, although he does 😊 inch closer to the screen in order to determine the exact placement of his horse (Going Wrong seems to be 😊 in third place, maybe second; it's hard to tell on the small screen).
At times he gets up to check the 😊 other four computers he has placed in various rooms in his house. They are all buzzing with their own activity, 😊 offering players from all over the planet bets that he has programmed. An electronic cry of "Goal!" can be heard 😊 every so often from one of them, announcing a new development in the ongoing Debrecen-Kaposvár game in the Hungarian League. 😊 The software immediately updates itself, offering 2.6/1 that it will be four-goal match. Soccer is the axis upon which García-Pelayo's 😊 private fund rotates. His computers offer 200 bets daily, from which he expects to earn some 15,000 euros a month, 😊 part of which will go to the investors and the remainder to a retirement fund. It took him a year 😊 to study how and what to program: "a degree in sports betting," he calls it. Though he will be 65 😊 in June, there are a lot of unexplained gaps on his résumé.
Gonzalo García-Pelayo posing with his wife and children on 😊 working vacations in Las Vegas.