Bill Benter: casino player, entrepreneur, professor and philanthropist
Physicist by training, Benter he discovered very early on how to profit from his talent for mathematics : counting cards in blackjack games. Thanks to his skills, in addition to the book of Beat the Dealer by Edward O. Thorp on this technique, Benter fleeced everyone who sat at his table, including the banker, until he was banned from entering, seven years later, a good part of the Las Vegas casinos.
In collaboration with Alan Woods, an expert player in horse racing, he developed a mathematical formula to get the results of these competitions right. The result? The development of a data analysis computer software that, so far, is one of the most accurate in the sector. Thanks to this formula, it is estimated that Benter receives a sum of $100 million a year . Almost nothing!
Edward O. Throp: the mathematician behind card counting
PhD in mathematics and ahead of his time, Throp developed using a software simulator the card counting strategy that served him to Bill Benter to be unbeatable playing blackjack. His book Beat the Dealer , the only guide on card counting, is the materialization of this strategy after its implementation in casinos in Las Vegas, Reno and Lake Tahoe. His mathematical knowledge also helped him to develop the first portable computer that he used at blackjack and roulette tables until its use was banned in 1985, as well as created and applied hedge fund techniques in different financial markets. His fortune is valued at 800 million dollars .
Zeljko Ranogajec: the world's biggest punter
The Australian Ranogajec immediately saw that the way to make money was to play blackjack. Endowed with a prodigious photographic memory and with a great talent for mathematics, Ranogajec it didn't take long for him to convert bets of a few hundred dollars into seven-figure amounts . After being banned from most casinos in his home country, he switched cards for horse racing, a discipline that allowed him to apply his mathematical knowledge to win a fortune.
Very suspicious of his private life and business, it is difficult to estimate the total value of his fortune. He is believed to own 8% of the turnover of Australian conglomerate Tabcorp which translates into astronomical figures of 1000 million dollars a year . If we add to this the 7.5 million dollars he earned in the nineties playing the keno , we can predict with very little margin of error that the descendants of Ranogajec will have life figured out for several generations.
Billy Walterns: no sports bet can resist him
Walterns has betting in his blood: son of a professional poker player and nephew of a professional bettor, he made his first bet at the age of nine . However, luck did not begin to smile at him until after 30 years; until then, his bets mostly reported losses and he was even about to lose his house.
Already as a professional bettor, he started his own bookmaker, something that was then illegal in his homeland, Kentucky. Since the eighties and already settled in Las Vegas, Walterns has only failed one bet, which has cost him to be banned from casinos in Las Vegas and even from bookmakers. To continue betting, he turns to other people who do it on his behalf. His fortune is estimated at 200 million dollars . He was convicted of abuse of confidential information and served his sentence until his sentence was commuted by Donald Trump in January 2021.
Phil Ivey, the Tiger Woods of poker
10 World Series of Poker bracelets, a title and nine-time finalist of the World Poker Tour - this is how we can summarize the professional career of Phil Ivey, one of the best poker players today. At the age of 20 he started playing professionally until he became the youngest player to win 10 bracelets of this prestigious poker tournament.
With a fortune valued at 100 million dollars, 19 of these are from online poker. The prestigious magazine All in Magazine he was proclaimed the best poker player in 2005 and 2009. In 2012 Ivey denounced the London casino Crockfords for refusing to hand over to him the payment of about nine million euros that he had supposedly won in a game of baccarat. The casino argued that the player had used the technique of "edge sorting” ( edge sorting in English). The British Supreme Court declared a ruling in favor of the casino in 2017 after it was discovered that Ivey had become friends with an Asian croupier to help him deploy this advantage through the use of a trick deck.
Patrik Antonius: from tennis player to successful poker player
A serious back injury ended Patrik's dream of becoming a professional tennis player. The Finn played for the first time in a casino at the age of 18 and, although at first he accumulated more losses than winnings, after a few months the situation took a 180-degree turn. Throughout his professional career, which began in 2002, he has accumulated a fortune of 11 million dollars playing exclusively online poker . His most lucrative period was from 2009 to 2013; in 2012 he entered $1,377,000 in a single hand in a game in the Aussie Million tournament, in which he placed second behind Phil Ivey . The player confesses that he has never read a book about poker or seen tutorials about this game and that he is all about self-taught.
As you have just seen, making money at the casino tables requires special, innate skills, such as a photographic mind, but also a certain expertise with the ways of circumventing the legality of the game .
