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.