Happy Valley Triple Trio Tales in Business Week

Discussed here is Bill Benter - he of a fabled Hong Kong Happy Valley track betting syndicate - the one reputed to have made the - or one of the - biggest killings of all time, and then not cashed in.

Coming out of a famed card counting Black Jack coteries of the '70s, Benter set out with computers and pooled financial resources to beat the horse racing game.  A difficult exotic called the Triple Trio was his Holy Grail.

In November 2001, he decided to have a final punt on the Triple Trio. Benter had avoided major prizes since 1997 for fear of angering the Jockey Club’s management, but this jackpot was too big to resist.

It was in fact $118 million.  But how did he get there?

His path was not altogether much different than others' - he followed the life-long study of probability. He studied and gave mathematical weights to the variables the contributed to a racing horse's measure. Like other he came up with his own 'true' estimate of the correct odds on a horse, and watched for underlays as the horses approached the post.

What made Benter and his team different was their willingness to bet great amounts of money on many many races, riding out their predictive mistakes, and waiting for the big score. As an example, Benter bet  HK$1.6 million on 51,000 combinations to finally hit the winning combination.

I guess the motto is 'don’t try this at home'.

There's a lot in Benter's methodology that is mirrored in most handicapping how-tos. Study the variables, track their  ultimate influence, assign odds, watch for the crowd's activity to diverge from those odds. Handle bankroll consistently whether going up or going down. Wager aggressively.

It is in this last point that I think it is fair to say Benter diverges from the usual. As a syndicate I think it is fair to say Benter was in a position to bet very heavily and to profit on smaller per race returns than the individual horse player. The value play for the  usual player starts, I think, at about 6- or 7-1.

They need even higher to offset the track vigorish, and to compensate for inevitable inabilities to precisely predict the future.

(And what about that big payoff, the one that went unredeemened? Well, the reason he did not cash in the ticket is, perhaps not suprisingly, not reasonably explained in an otherwise marvelous story.)

Read: The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code - BW, May 2018

Also: Check out this YouTube lecture by Benter, (below)  which in the first half is a properly erudite review of the history of the connection -n between gambling, math and probability, followed in the second half with consideration of the elements that go into plotting the values of thoroughbreds and the likely outcomes of their races.



PDF version of the PPT that accompanied Benter's 2014 presentation


Computer Based Horse Race Handicapping and Wagering Systems
www.cms.zju.edu.cn/UploadFiles/AttachFiles/20054191750380.ppt
Apr 19, 2005 - How gambling inspired the scientific study of probability .... Benter, William F., “Computer Based Horse Race Handicapping and Wagering ...
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