Post date: May 05, 2018 7:2:22 PM
Bill Benter is one of the most profitable professional gamblers in the world. According to Wikipedia
William Benter was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.[2] As he grew up, he wanted to use his mathematical talents to make a profit so immediately after finishing a university physics degree in 1977,[3] he went to the blackjack tables in Las Vegas and used his skills to count cards. He came across the book, Beat the Dealer, by Edward O. Thorp, which helped him improve his methods.[4] Seven years later, he was banned from most of Vegas’ strip’s casinos.[2]
Benter then met with Alan Woods, a like-minded gambler whose expertise in horse racing complemented his own in computers. The two became racing partners and in 1984, moved to Hong Kong.[3] Starting with a mere US$150,000 (equivalent to US$353,331 in 2017), the pair relied on their mathematical skill to create a formula for choosing race winners.[2]
Using his statistical model, Benter identified factors that could lead to successful race predictions. He found that some came out as more important than others.[5] Benter later worked with Robert Moore.
Benter is a visiting professor at the Southampton Management School[6] as part of the Centre for Risk Research and a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society.[7]
Bloomberg recently published an interesting story about his career,
Benter grew up in a Pittsburgh idyll called Pleasant Hills. He was a diligent student and an Eagle Scout, and he began to study physics 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 overcome 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 profit, 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 scruff. It thrilled him to see scientific principles 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 floors, 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. Read more
But can a winning horse racing system be applied to the stock markets? Benter himself provided an answer in this video
ByMarketNews
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