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Who is the richest Gambler in the world and what games made him rich?

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Making money with gambling…

People will not become rich from gambling in most cases. Casinos love to make their players think that they have very good chances of winning, but if that were true, they wouldn’t be viable businesses. Casinos love to pretend like their games have a chance to make players rich, but they would not be viable businesses if that happened consistently. Some people have managed to amass a fortune through games of chance though, despite al. the ways in which the system was stacked against them.

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Bill Benter

Standing head and shoulders above all the other rich gamblers is American billionaire William Benter. He managed to amass a fortune of around one billion through gambling, mostly by playing Blackjack and placing bets on horse races.

Early life of Bill Benter

William Benter was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Benter finished a university degree in 1977 for mathematics, which is where he developed his skills in calculating probability. He first tried to put these skills to use at the blackjack tables on the Las Vegas strip. It could be said he was both successful as well as unsuccessful. While he won quite frequently and was able to earn enough money to support his Vegas lifestyle, he would eventually be banned from most casinos for winning just a little too often. After seven years of living in Vegas and going from casino to casino, he had nowhere left to go. Every casino on the Vegas Strip had banned him, which meant he was forced to change up his lifestyle.

After he was banned from the strip, he came into contact with Alan Woods. Woods was, much like Benter himself, a mathematician who used his education to win games of chance. Woods, however, specialized on betting on horse races instead of blackjack. Woods and Benter came to the decision to become business partners, as Woods could us his experience and knowledge with horse racing to help develop their software further. The two of them moved to Hong Kong in 1984. They thought that their combined mathematical knowledge would allow them to develop a formula to accurately predict the outcome of horse races.

It turned out that they were correct in their assumptions. Their formula was successful and was raking in enormous amounts of money for the both of them. After couple of years of this success, Woods and Benter split apart. Benter decided to expand on the formula and the software it used further. His most recent software update allows the program to take more than 130 variables into account and calculates where players need to bet a certain amount of money to gain the most.

Benter decided it would be more productive if he were to hire others to do the betting for him. His team of gamblers would bet just a few seconds before the betting round ended. This strategy allowed him to reportedly earn somewhere between 5 to 10 million dollars a day at the horse races.

Personal life of Bill Benter

Benter does not just spend his earnings on himself, as he has shown himself to be a major philanthropist. He donates money to quite a number of charities based in the United States, as well as Hong Kong. A large part of his money is also used on political donations. He has funded numerous democratic candidates on multiple levels of the political scale in the past, most prominently donating to Barack Obama´s presidential campaign in 2008. He has donated numerous times to the campaigns of smaller democratic candidates as well. An example of this was his donation of thousands of dollars to fund advertisements for Charles Timothy Hagel when he was nominated to be the next Secretary of Defense under Barack Obamas presidency.

Benter has long been personally involved with University of Pittsburgh as well, donating a million dollars to them in 2012. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and has presented papers at a number of international conferences, as well as delivering lectures at:

  • The Chinese University of Hong Kong (1999, 2001, 2002),
  • Stanford University (2002),
  • Harvard University (2002),
  • Carnegie Mellon University (2006),
  • City University of Hong Kong (2004),
  • University of Southampton (2006, 2007),
  • University of Nevada, Las Vegas (2003).

In March of 2012, Benter married Hong Kong native Vivian Fung. They performed the marriage ceremony in a traditional Tibetan Buddhist rite. They had their first son in 2015, three years later. They decided to call him Henry. They live in Pittsburgh currently, where he is the CEO of Accusis LLC, a company that develops numerous kinds of software.

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