Despite the fact that Spain is a country where gambling is very popular and its sector means money, work and most importantly entertainment, we have seen few outstanding players who managed to exit the casinos as winners. And that there are very good casinos in Spain, the best ones are usually found in the big cities, but players haven’t yet found the key and gotten the hang of the game. Maybe it’s because we understand the true root of what chance and luck are.

Perhaps the Pelayo family is the only one who broke with these plans and became the terror of roulette and all that goes with it. However, there are other examples that we can look at and it’s good to take a look at characters like… Thomas Garcia. A man from Barcelona who was also fascinated by the honey of roulette and who had his idyll with it, already in the middle of the 19th century when gambling halls were almost a chimera and the industry was still underdeveloped, as it is today is.

Garcia was a man from a good family. A wealthy man who experienced no economic disasters and was very persistent in everything he did. He liked to insist until he got what he wanted or until he was confronted with reality. Gaming was one of those passions and he was particularly fond of roulette. He also played other card games and in fact he was always considered in public opinion as some kind of cheat who marked the cards and ended up winning his games illegally. He was even accused of having a problem with a casino.

The fact is that García traveled all over the world for professional reasons and wherever he went and could he took the opportunity to play. It was in 1860 that he approached it Casino Homburg, the home of the magician François Blanc, and it was there that a true roulette legend was born. He appeared in the German city in impeccable clothes, valuable objects and heavily perfumed, which did not go unnoticed by visitors to the casino. But what the Spaniard also expressed was that he was a cold man. He didn’t express his feelings even when he was winning, and even when he was losing he kept trying.

At a table where betting was much faster, he managed to win more than 750,000 francs in a week. How did you get it? Through the so-called “Garcia method“. He himself had managed to devise his own system for winning at roulette, and this was later rediscovered by other gambling experts as the snowball method. García believed that his system was perfect and that with it he would be able to keep many of the casinos he was targeting in check. But this formula also had its problems.

Thomas Garcia

The method basically tried to take a certain amount of money that seemed suitable for everyone to play with. One-third of that amount is used on a first bet, and if it’s a loser you bet the other two-thirds.so the rest. Regardless of whether you win on the first or second bet, you always win 33% more than you had. The only way to lose is if you lose both betsBut that didn’t seem to be a cause for concern for Garcia. Maybe because money wasn’t a problem for him.

This allowed you to make money very quickly, as happened to the Catalan the first time, but you could also lose it very quickly if you got into a bad streak. And that’s what happened to him eventually. On this day in 1860, his agent managed to get him to stop gambling and walk away in style with his winnings, but couldn’t stop him from completing a real ruin a year later. An episode that tarnished the good reputation he had, although, we say, people weren’t too surprised because the impression he gave was that of a very gambler who cared little about winning or losing. He wanted to constantly check the strength of his system.

A system that failed him on his return to Homburg in 1861. Although he didn’t have the same amount of money to bet by this point as he had last time, he was leaving a lot of money on the street due to betting using the Garcia method. Even after losing everything he had, he decided to take out a loan he left with an acquaintance just to keep using it in roulette. He wanted to recover as it was. However, he wouldn’t make it.

In the end he lost everything and left Homburg devastated. Although he continued to play later, The episode affected him so much that he never returned to the city or to the German casino.

To believe that he was an intelligent man capable of creating his own system and had ideals that he believed in to the end is just a matter of belief. As well as the thought that this formula isn’t really reliable for mathematically beating the bank and that he’s more of a swindler and a waste than a good player. The fact is that he was a Spanish professionally devoted to gambling, which was gaining prominence in his day.

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