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Bloomberg Businessweek
May 14, 2018
Moore favored Ridgeway’s pool bar, where he’d start ights
and boast about his gambling exploits. Woods didn’t drink
much, but he enjoyed ecstasy, and he could be found most
nights in Neptune II, a neon dungeon full of drunk business-
men and much younger women.
Benter was a more reserved presence. He could often
be seen sitting at the end of a bar, engaged in quiet conver-
sation. Over time an aura built
up. To the small group of insid-
ers who knew that software
had conquered Happy Valley—
perhaps a dozen people—Benter
was the acknowledged master.
Even Woods (in an interview he
later gave to an Australian jour-
nalist) admitted that his rival’s
model was the best. But the two men couldn’t resolve their
diferences. When Benter saw his old partner in Wan Chai,
he would smile politely and walk away. They’d gone 10 years
without speaking.
hroughout 1997 a shadow loomed over Hong
Kong. After 156 years of colonial rule, the British
were set to hand the territory back to China
on July 1. There were news reports of Chinese
troops massed at the border, and many island-
ers feared it would be the end of Hong Kong’s freewheel-
ing capitalism. China tried to reassure residents that their
most treasured customs would be protected. “Horse racing
will continue, and the dancing parties will go on,” said Deng
Xiaoping, the former Communist Party leader.
Benter faced an additional and more peculiar anxiety. A
month before the handover, his team won a huge Triple Trio
jackpot. They were in the middle of an epic winning sea-
son, up more than $50 million. The Jockey Club normally put
Triple Trio winners in front of the TV cameras to show how,
for example, a night watchman had changed his life with a
single bet. This time, nobody wanted to tout that the winner
was an American algorithm.
The club had come to see the syndicates’ success as a
headache. There was no law against what they were doing,
but in a parimutuel gambling system, every dollar they won
was a dollar lost by someone else. If the everyday punters at
Happy Valley and Sha Tin ever found out that foreign com-
puter nerds were siphoning millions from the pools, they
might stop playing entirely.
Benter had his Big CIT privileges revoked. On June 14
one of his phone operators called the Telebet line and was
told, “Your account has been suspended.” Woods was also
blocked. Club oicials issued a statement saying they had
acted to “protect the interests of the general betting pub-
lic.” Benter lew back to Vegas, as he did every summer,
to think about his next move. He reread the club’s state-
ment. Phone betting was out—but nowhere did it say he was
prohibited from betting altogether. He got an idea. As in
his blackjack days, it would require a low proile.
One Friday evening that autumn, after the handover of
the territory to China, Benter paid for a hotel room in Hong
Kong’s bayside North Point district. He made sure to get
a space on the ground loor for easy access. He had help-
ers haul in laptops, a 50-pound printer, and stacks of blank
betting slips. On Saturday morning—race day—they checked
the internet connection and
put a “Do Not Disturb” sign on
the door.
At 1:45 p.m., 15 minutes
before the irst race, the lap-
tops received lines of bets from
Benter’s Happy Valley oice.
The printer began to suck in
blank tickets and churn them
out with black marks in the relevant betting boxes.
Eight minutes to starting pistol. Benter grabbed a pile of
80-odd printed tickets and a club-issued credit voucher worth
HK$1 million and bolted for the door. Across from the hotel
was an of-track betting shop. It was loud and smoky inside,
and he found an automated betting terminal free at one side
of the room. Two minutes to go. He started feeding in tick-
ets, one after another after another, until the screen lashed
a message: “Betting closed.”
Benter hurried back to the hotel room to see which wagers
had hit. At 2:15 p.m. the laptops downloaded the next pack-
age of bets from the oice. Time to go again. Simultaneously,
other teams hired by Benter were doing the same in difer-
ent parts of Hong Kong.
Benter’s solution to the phone ban was time-consuming
and required him to manage teams of runners, who risked
being robbed. But it was almost as proitable as his old
arrangement. The club continued to exchange his cash vouch-
ers for checks, and no one came to shut him down. Woods
kept betting in a slightly diferent manner, sending members
of an extended roster of Philippine girlfriends directly to the
racetrack with bags full of cash.
ublicity is a hex for professional gamblers. That
fall an increasingly erratic Moore drew more
attention to algorithmic betting, irst by brag-
ging to the local press—who nicknamed him the
“God of Horses”—and then by fatally overdosing
on sleeping pills.
Afterward, Hong Kong’s tax authority began to investigate
the Woods syndicate. By law, gambling winnings were exempt
from taxation, but company proits weren’t. The question was
whether the syndicates had moved beyond conventional bet-
ting and started behaving like corporations. The implications
would be dire if the Inland Revenue Department decided to
tax proits retroactively. When agents asked Woods for a list
of his investors, he led to the Philippines.
Benter continued to operate his in-person betting scheme
through the turn of the millennium, with his model