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The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code (2018)
- notforviewingit 2y agoPeople are mythologising making money by gambling. In terms of tech the industry is like 20 years behind the financial markets. Source, I worked at company that did arbitrage in online sports betting in 2010s that employed around 30 or so people and did hundreds of millions in profit.
- shkkmo 2y agoThis story predates that period by well over a decade. Even if the company you worked for isn't one of the ones named towards the end of the article, it is very likely that the company you worked for was in some way connected with people from either or both of Benter's or Woods' operations.
- notforviewingit 2y agoI doubt there is a strong link between the founders of my old employer and Benter or Woods. My old employer did totally different kind of betting. No blackjack or horses. In general people overestimate how hard it is to make money in gambling. You don't need to be some kind of savant to do it. The people in general are similar to what you would find in your average tech company. Sure there is a founder with a vision and some sort of an insight into making money, but every company has one.
- chillydawg 2y agoCertainly helped to be early in that particular market. It certainly helped that Hammersmith lot.
- sourcepluck 2y agoCould you share the name of your former employer, or if you can't, could you share the name of similar employers? I'm on a bit of a probability (gambling, sports betting, stats, etc) kick these days, and I'd be interested in reading more about people and companies doing this in practice. I'd been imagining there must be organised sports gamblers, but they don't seem to be overly searchable.
- LiamPa 2y agoSearch betcode, plenty of us on the slack. https://github.com/betcode-org https://github.com/betcode-org
- sourcepluck 2y agoOh wow, it's happening there! I've followed and starred and bookmarked and all that, and will be having a browse around a bit more closely when I get a moment. I think I'm roughly understanding what the group is about. I'll follow up, thanks!
- harveynick 2y agoLooks like the slack invite expired?
- LiamPa 2y agoThis one work? https://join.slack.com/t/betcode-org/shared_invite/zt-2uer9n451-w1QOehxDcG_JXqQfjoMvQA https://join.slack.com/t/betcode-org/shared_invite/zt-2uer9n...
- notforviewingit 2y agoI don’t know exactly how these companies make their money and how successful they are, but I at least believe all of them are in the odds computation business. They might be supplying prices to bookmakers instead of betting themselves etc. Longshot Systems Football Radar Gambit Research SportsRadar Odds Reactor Star Lizard Smartodds Smarkets These companies are known more for their HFT trading in financial markets, but I believe they have also expanded into sports betting. jane street jump trading Susquehanna Also some of the bookmakers such as matchbook have started as betting group and then overtime turned into a bookmaker as that is where the real money is.
- sourcepluck 2y agoThank you, that's wonderful, I'll be sleuthing there and getting a feel for things. Cheers!
- josephg 2y agoYeah; I briefly did some consulting work at a sports betting company. They have a database of hundreds of people who are essentially banned because they’re too good at picking winners, and the betting company loses money having them as clients. Internally they track how much each account wins & loses. If you win too much, the site gives you worse and worse odds until eventually you’re banned entirely. The reverse is also true: if you’re a terrible better, the site gives you better odds hoping to keep you coming back for more. They have a whole team whose job it is to instantly block smart betters from opening new accounts. Accounts opened in the name of their girlfriends is the classic thing they watch out for. Some of the smartest gamblers also get hired as quants, and help figure out what the odds should be on the site.
- notforviewingit 2y agoIn Europe bookies just get rid of good players, except for the exchanges and Pinnacle. No one serious will gamble with European bookmakers. Though maybe this has changed lately. I have not been following field recently. In Asia the bookies are a lot more tolerant, especially the larger ones. You really have to hit their pnl hard for you to get cut off.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- brudgers 2y agoCould survivor bias be a more likely explanation than a good system? I mean among a large pool of people systematically betting on horse racing, a few are likely to have winning outcomes.
- Allybag 2y agoI am a professional automated sports gambler, and I win basically every day, and the handful of losing days I have per quarter are significantly smaller than the average daily win. If you place enough bets (I make about 15k bets each day that are matched) that have a positive expected value your chances of a losing day become pretty low. For example, I had a losing day on Christmas Day, but was only able to place about 500 bets as it was such a big holiday that there were almost no events.
- anoncow 2y agoTeach me your ways.
- MaxikCZ 2y agoAnd me please, ill give you some portion of my profits :P
- Someone 2y agoI don’t know their ways, but I expect there’s a lot of emotion in sports betting that can be exploited (bookmakers will not purely optimize for expected profit, but also want lower variance in their profits). If so, betting against clubs in rich countries where betting is popular is the better option. Whether it beats the bookmaker’s margin I wouldn’t know.
- le-mark 2y agoThese guys never talk about the details. Either they’re LARPing or there’s something to it. “Betting exchange” is your clue. I’ve followed this thread before. Apparently the exchanges are mostly in Asia and allow people to buy and sell bets. So presumably this person is placing bets well before the date the event occurs and using them to arbitrage the result as the event nears. This is due to line movement up to the event. To participate in this you have to use btc/crypto and risk being ripped off with no legal recourse. Also presumably there’s a system around what bet to place when. They never talk about that.
- patrickhogan1 2y agoThe title for Bloomberg says “Bill Benter did the impossible: He wrote an algorithm that couldn’t lose at the track.” The article is more nuanced. He created an EV+ system. It included tickets bought that did lose as part of the system he used. In fact buying tickets that would lose was part of his system. Along with other tickets that would win.
- caminante 2y agoClickbait tagline indeed. Buying 50k individual tickets to win 13 million is great ROI, but didn't see guaranteed ROI. Also, the cover > How to make $1 billion betting on horses is called into question as it's alleged that at best, the firm may have made $1 billion, but not individuals. I guess a few allegedly came close? Hard to verify.
- patrickhogan1 2y agoI noticed my previous comment was downvoted, and I'd like to better understand why. The point I raised was intended to clarify the discussion and was based on factual information. If there's something incorrect or unclear in what I said, I’d appreciate it if you could point it out or share your perspective. It would be helpful to know if I misunderstood something or if my tone came across in a way I didn’t intend. Constructive feedback is always welcome!
- yawnxyz 2y agoGreat article, very well-written narrative, but seems to leave some things out. From 2018 (please add tag)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- vajrabum 2y agoHere are two papers referenced in the article. This one inspired Bill Benter https://gwern.net/doc/statistics/decision/1986-bolton.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/statistics/decision/1986-bolton.pdf And Bill Benter wrote this one in 1995 describing his system https://gwern.net/doc/statistics/decision/1994-benter.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/statistics/decision/1994-benter.pdf
- larrydag 2y agoThis is really interesting. It's not unlike building a credit bureau model like a FICO score. Just trying to find a probability of likelihood outcome.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dtkirby 2y agohttps://archive.is/g32Da https://archive.is/g32Da
- mrandish 2y agoBritish magician Darren Brown aired a TV special called "The System" revealing a foolproof method which allowed him to provide the name of the winning horse to a lucky person who randomly responded to his newspaper advertisement in time for that person to bet on the race and win. He continued doing this with that person for six more races over six consecutive weeks - with that person betting their own money and winning each time, beating astronomical odds and winning quite a large sum. The bets were real, legally placed in advance on televised races at regulated betting parlors and the person really randomly responded to the ad without knowing Brown beforehand. For the last race Brown and the person met at the race track but for all the prior races Brown didn't even know when or where the person would place their bet. He really had no involvement or even contact, other than sending the name of the horse to bet on via email once a week. Of course, it's (sort of) a very clever trick. All is revealed in the show (now on Brown's YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR970Y10WNw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR970Y10WNw). I showed it to my kid who had recently asked me about a state lottery billboard claiming "Someone has to win!" and it proved to be an entertainingly effective answer as well as providing some good ways to think critically about gambling propositions.
- segfaultbuserr 2y agoIs a binary search involved in this "gambling system"?
- gmiller123456 2y agoYou get so many respondents, you can give them all different combinations. Each race you disregard the losers, and when the population gets low enough you might miss a race, you just say "hey, I predicted x races, call Bob to confirm".
- mrandish 2y agoYes, that's basically how it worked. To be clear, Brown was careful to promote and run it for entertainment and not a scam. He made very clear up front that those choosing to participate were very likely to lose their money and insisted that the early bet amounts were minimal "fun money". The ever-shrinking number of those continuing to later rounds had made enough from earlier wins to offset the later eventual loss.
- PaulHoule 2y agoThere is this classic https://www.amazon.com/Dr-Beat-Racetrack-William-Ziemba/dp/0688072216 https://www.amazon.com/Dr-Beat-Racetrack-William-Ziemba/dp/0... His idea is that the odds (on the tote board) to win can be used to make a more accurate predictor for winning place and show than the place and show odds on the board. What you notice is that maybe two times a day at the track you find a horse which is favored to win and the show bet pays almost as much as the win bet and you place a Kelly-sized bet on that one. I've found a few opportunities of that sort at the local harness racing track.
- petesergeant 2y agoI think you have no idea how confusing this comment is, given the overloading of “place” and “show”. For anyone else confused, “win” means come first, “place” means come first or second, and “show” means come in the top three. The technique being described here is using the fact that “win” odds are usually very accurate about the underlying probabilities, but for some reason “place” and “show” aren’t, so you can take advantage of the accuracy of “win” to find better-than-normal bets.
- PaulHoule 2y agoThanks for adding that clarification.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago(2018) Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16985413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16985413 And in 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20865312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20865312 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26992070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26992070
- 3abiton 2y agoIt's always fun to dog into hn lore!
- asdasdsddd 2y agoEverytime I read these articles, it's just, train a ML model and beat the bookie. So simple in hindsight.
- kristjansson 2y agoTrain an ML model in the early PC era from horse race data stored on paper, train a CV model in the early GPU era on parking lot data from satellites, figure out MC options pricing in the early minicomputer era (before BS) … Being first looks simple in hindsight
- sevenseacat 2y agoYeah, in the 1990s.
- sema4hacker 2y agoMy recollection is that a variation of this scheme was the basis for a Twilight Zone episode back in the 60's.
- tamaharbor 2y agoAlfred Hitchcock?
- sema4hacker 2y agoYou're right! S3E2 "Mail Order Prophet", originally aired 10/13/57, but I didn't see it until it re-ran in the 60's.