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documents. Only one thing Benter ever told me turned out
to be untrue. It was at the outset of our conversations, when
he said he didn’t think I’d ind anything interesting to write
about in his career.
enter grew up in a Pittsburgh idyll called
Pleasant Hills. He was a diligent student and
an Eagle Scout, and he began to study phys-
ics in college. His parents had always given him
freedom—on vacations, he’d hitchhiked across
Europe to Egypt and driven through Russia—and in 1979, at
age 22, he put their faith to the test. He left school, boarded a
Greyhound bus, and went to play cards in Las Vegas.
Benter had been enraptured by
Beat the Dealer
, a 1962 book
by math professor Edward Thorp that describes how to over-
come the house’s advantage in blackjack. Thorp is credited
with inventing the system known as card counting: Keep track
of the number of high cards dealt, then bet big when it’s likely
that high cards are about to fall. It takes concentration, and lots
of hands, to turn a tiny advantage into a proit, but it works.
Thorp’s book was a beacon for shy young men with a
gift for mathematics and a yearning for a more interesting
life. When Benter got to Las Vegas, he worked at a 7-Eleven
for $3 an hour and took his wages to budget casinos. The
Western—with its dollar cocktails and shabby patrons getting
drunk at 10 a.m.—and the faded El Cortez were his turf. He
didn’t mind the scruf. It thrilled him to see scientiic prin-
ciples play out in real life, and he liked the hedonistic city’s
eccentric characters. It was the era of peak disco, with Donna
Summer and Chic’s
Le Freak
all over the radio. On a good day,
Benter might win only about $40, but he’d found his métier—
and some new friends. Fellow Thorp acolytes were easy to
spot on casino loors, tending to be conspicuously focused
and sober. Like them, Benter was a complete nerd. He had
a small beard, wore tweedy jackets, and talked a lot about
probability theory.
In 1980 he’d just applied for a job as a night cleaner at
McDonald’s when his buddies introduced him to the man
who would change his life. Alan Woods was the leader of
an Australian card-counting team that had recently arrived
in Las Vegas. Woods was then in his mid-30s, with a swoop
of gray hair and cold blue eyes. Once an insurance actu-
ary with a wife and two kids, he’d decided one day that
family life wasn’t for him and began traveling the world as
an itinerant gambler.
Woods impressed Benter with his tales of fearlessness,
recounting how he’d sneaked past airport security in Manila
with $10,000 stufed into his underwear. Most appealing, he
pursued the card counter’s craft with discipline. His team
pooled its cash and divided winnings equitably. Having more
players reduced the risk of a run of bad luck wiping out one’s
bankroll, and the camaraderie ofset the solitary nature of the
work. Benter joined the squad.
Within six weeks, he found himself playing blackjack in
Monte Carlo, served by waiters in dinner jackets. He felt like
James Bond, and his earnings grew to a rate of about $80,000
a year. Benter abandoned any idea of returning to college.
When his mother’s friends in Pittsburgh asked how his stud-
ies were going, she told them, “Bill’s traveling right now.”
Benter and his teammates got a house in the Vegas sub-
urbs, living like geeky college fraternity brothers. Woods
strictly forbade drinking on the job, so the men would wait
until after their shifts to knock back beers and trade stories
of scrapes with casino security, who were constantly on the
lookout for card counting. Bull-necked pit bosses patrolled
the loors. A suspicious player would be told to leave or,
worse, backroomed: interrogated in a dingy oice. There
were rumors of counters being beaten and drugged. Benter
thought the treatment was unjustiied. He wasn’t a cheat. He
just played smart.
After a couple of years, Benter was playing quietly at the
Maxim one day when a meaty hand descended on his shoul-
der. “Come with me,” said a burly guy in a suit. In the back,
Benter was shoved into a chair and told to produce some
identiication. He refused. The guard walked out, and an even
more menacing guy walked in: “Show me your f---ing ID!”
Benter got out his wallet.
Afterward—it was probably 1984—Benter, Woods, and some
of their partners earned a place in the Griin Book, a black-
list that a detective agency circulated to casinos. On top of the
indignity of having their mug shots next to hustlers and pick-
pockets, the notoriety made it almost impossible for them to
keep playing in Vegas. They needed to ind another game.
Woods knew there were giant horse-betting pools to tap
in Asia—and that the biggest of all was run by the Hong Kong
Jockey Club. Begun in 1884 as a refuge for upper-crust Brits
who wanted a stretch of England’s green and pleasant land
in their subtropical colony, the club changed over time into
a state gambling monopoly. Its two courses, Happy Valley
and Sha Tin, were packed twice a week during a racing sea-
son that extended from September to July. Hong Kong’s pop-
ulation was then only about 5.5 million, but it bets more on
horses than the entire U.S., reaching about $10 billion annu-
ally by the 1990s.
Hong Kong racing uses a parimutuel (also known as “total-
izer”) system. Unlike odds in a Vegas sportsbook, which are set
in advance and give a decisive edge to the house, parimutuel
odds are updated luidly, in proportion to how bettors wager.
Winners split the pool, and the house skims a commission of
about 17 percent. (After costs, the Jockey Club’s take goes to
charity and the state, providing as much as a tenth of Hong
Kong’s tax revenue.) To make money, Benter would have to
do more than pick winners: He needed to make bets with a
proit margin greater than the club’s 17 percent cut.
He went to the Gambler’s Book Club, a Vegas institution,
and bought everything he could ind on horses. There were
lots of “systems” promising incredible results, but to him they
seemed limsy, written by journalists and amateur handicap-
pers. Few contained real math. Benter wanted something
more rigorous, so he went to the library at the University of
64
Bloomberg Businessweek
May 14, 2018