From working at McDonald’s to winning Billions in Horse Betting

From working as a night cleaner at McDonald’s to making around a Billion dollars betting on horses! (heading). Bill Benter was a diligent student who began to study physics in college, had left schooling to play cards in Vegas professionally. At Vegas, he worked for $3/hour jobs & then took his wages to play at budget casinos.

In 1980, applied to work as a night cleaner at McDonald’s, when he was introduced to Alan Woods – the turning point in his life. Bill joined Woods’ gambling squad & his casino earnings grew to $80,000/year using “mathematical strategies” playing Black Jack. In 1984, Benter & Woods got blacklisted from Vegas Casinos for ‘winning too much, too often’. Then they decided to tap Asia’s biggest – highest stakes on horse racing betting pool in Hong Kong.

With his intelligence, Bill would have also gotten richer faster working in finance. But he wanted to conquer horse betting – not because it was hard, but cuz it was said to be “impossible”. Benter taught himself ‘advanced statistical modeling’ to ace codes for his horse betting algorithm model of probability. In September 1985 he flew to Hong Kong with 3 bulky IBM computers. Twice a week, on race days, Benter would sit at the computer.

But, by the year 1986 – Lost $150 million in year 1 and learned a ton of lessons.

Data sets, Probabilities, Combinations, Predictions, Bets, Repeat. Didn’t quit, went back at it. Increased betting exponentially. More data he gathered a higher probability of accuracy. A breakthrough came in 1990-91 when Benter hit on the idea of incorporating niche data sets hiding in plain sight – like the temperature that influenced horses, a number of rest days for the horse, bumped, blocked inclusive of factors like wind speeds to what the horses ate for breakfast! Formed a team of around 50 employees from diverse backgrounds – coders, consultants, gamblers, data analysts, scientists to work on the algorithm & research data sets.

When Benter hit on an idea of this data & it won his team about $3 million in 1990-91. After which one fine day, his team won a huge Triple Trio jackpot of more than $50 million. This led to concerns about a geeky betting company that wins often and his ‘company account’ got suspended by the authorities of the Jockey Club to protect the interests of the general betting public. In Nov 2001, he decided to have a final punt through his unofficial individual account on the Triple Trio (Win chances were 1 in 10 million!).

His bet was HK $1.6 Million on 51,000 combinations. If he won, he decided to leave the tickets unclaimed! He won & left the ~$1 Bn (118M HKD) a Triple Trio and let his winnings go “Unclaimed” Was distributed to “charity” houses as per Jockey club policies, exactly as Bill intended!
 
Why did he do it? To beat the odds, to prove his passion and obsession for the science of gambling worked on the race track. Today, his estimated net worth is over $1 Billion, is a philanthropist & professor at Southampton University in the USA.

“Gambling has always been the domain of wise guys from the wrong side of the track.”- Bill Benter.