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Bloomberg Businessweek
May 14, 2018
Woods left the bulk of his estate to his two children in
Australia and gave token sums to various ex-girlfriends,
including a Filipina who said he’d fathered her child. A wake
was held in a bar at the Happy Valley racetrack and attended
by an eclectic crowd of gamblers and hustlers. To the last,
Woods never believed that Benter had won the 2001 Triple
Trio and given up the jackpot.
ambling,” Benter told me in his Pittsburgh
oice, “has always been the domain of wise
guys from the wrong side of the track.” Perhaps
more than anyone else, Benter has changed
that perception—within the tiny population of
people who gamble for a living, that is.
By the time he moved back to Pittsburgh, he’d inspired oth-
ers in Hong Kong to form syndicates of their own. In response,
the Jockey Club began publishing reams of technical data and
analysis on its website to level the playing ield. With a little
efort, anyone could be a systematic gambler—or mimic one.
The odds boards at Happy Valley and Sha Tin were color-coded
to show big swings in the volume of wagers on a horse, spe-
ciically to reveal whom the syndicates were backing. The
robo-bettors’ numbers have continued to proliferate. After
Woods’s death, his children maintained his Hong Kong oper-
ation, but other members of the team went into business
for themselves. And Benter spread the secrets of his success
in various ways: He gave math talks at universities, shared
his theories with employees and consultants, and even pub-
lished an academic paper laying out his system. The 1995
document—“Computer-Based Horse Race Handicapping and
Wagering Systems: A Report”—became a manual for an entire
generation of high-tech gamblers.
Today, online betting on sports of all kinds is a $60 bil-
lion industry, growing rapidly everywhere outside the U.S.,
where the practice is mostly banned. The Supreme Court,
however, may lift federal restrictions this year, and if it does,
American dollars will lood the market, increasing liquidity
and the proits of computer teams. Big names from the world
of inance have taken notice.
In 2016, Susquehanna International Group LLP, an
American quantitative trading company, started an Ireland-
based operation called Nellie Analytics Inc., targeting
basketball, American football, soccer, and tennis. Phoenix,
a proprietary sports-betting company with headquarters in
Malta and data-mining operations in the Philippines, won a
9 million ($13 million) investment in 2010 from a unit of RIT
Capital Partners Plc, the 3 billion trust chaired by Lord Jacob
Rothschild of the global banking dynasty. (RIT sold its stake
in 2016 to a private buyer, quadrupling its money.) What isn’t
widely known is that Phoenix was founded by former employ-
ees of Woods, including his protégé Paul Longmuir.
Many of the biggest players in sports betting can trace a
lineage directly to the Benter-Woods axis. For example, the
Australian press has called Zeljko Ranogajec “the world’s
biggest punter.” Today he runs a global algorithmic gambling
empire, but he began his career in Las Vegas counting cards
with Benter and Woods, then followed them to Hong Kong.
During a rare interview in London, Ranogajec said, “A sub-
stantial portion of our success is attributable to the pioneer-
ing work done by Benter.”
enter has few regrets. One relates to an attempt
in the early 1990s to create a model for betting
on baseball. He spent three summers develop-
ing the system and only broke even—for him, a
stinging professional defeat. America’s pastime
was just too unpredictable.
That failure, however, led to a second period of his career
as lucrative as Hong Kong was. He worked with one of his base-
ball backers to start betting on U.S. horse racing. Parimutuel
tracks are scattered around the country, and by the late 1990s
it became easier to amass data on a lot of them. The U.S. busi-
ness took of just as competition began eroding proits in Hong
Kong. “There is a golden age for a particular market,” he said,
iddling with a stack of decommissioned casino chips. “When
there aren’t many computer players, the guy with the best sys-
tem can have a huge advantage.”
In 2010, Benter married Vivian Fung, whom he’d met at
the Rotary Club in Hong Kong. The couple have a young son,
and Benter seems in every sense a contented man. An active
philanthropist, he donated $1 million to a Pittsburgh charter
school program and $3 million to a polio immunization efort
in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and parts of Africa. In 2007 he started
the charitable Benter Foundation, which donates to health,
education, and the arts. Many of the people he meets at galas
and nights at the opera have no idea how he made his money.
And how much is that—exactly? During our interviews,
it was the one topic that made him visibly uncomfortable.
William Ziemba, a inance professor at the University of
British Columbia who studied the Hong Kong syndicates,
has said that a irst-rate team could make $100 million in a
good season. Edward Thorp (who’s still writing about gam-
bling in his 80s) asserted in a 2017 book that Benter had a
“billion-dollar worldwide business betting on horse races.”
When pushed, Benter conceded that his operations have
probably made close to a billion dollars overall, but that some
of the money has gone to partners in Hong Kong and the U.S.
“Unfortunately,” he said, “I’m not a billionaire.”
Thirty-two years after he irst arrived in Hong Kong, Benter
is still betting on horses at venues around the world. He can
see the odds change in the seconds before a race as all the
computer players place their bets at the same time, and he’s
amazed he can still win. He continues tinkering with his
model. The latest change: How much does moving to a new
trainer improve a horse’s performance?
Benter also runs a medical transcription company, but it’s
only modestly proitable. “I ind the real business world to
be a lot more diicult than horse racing,” he told me. “I’m
kind of a one-trick pony.”
—With Jonathan Browning and
Giles Turner