22 Feb

Famous Aussie Gambler: Alan Woods

Famous Aussie Gambler Alan WoodsAustralian Alan Woods has been considered one of the world’s best gamblers for many years now. Even today, despite his passing in 2008, he’s often ranked among the top three most successful bettors ever to live. The famous Aussie gambler started out by beating the casinos at blackjack, and worked his way up to computer-formulated horse racing.

Famous Aussie Gambler

Born in 1945 in Murwillumbah, New South Wales, Australia, Alan Woods was a mathematical prodigy. He knew numbers like he knew the back of his hand, and he absolutely loved working with them.

Naturally – like many savants of his time – that led him to develop superior blackjack strategies. He partnered up with fellow mathematician Bill Benter, and together their adept skills led them to beat the blackjack tables, first at casinos in NSW, then all over Australia and beyond.

Woods’s best year in the blackjack card-counting scene came in 1979, when he traveled to casinos all over the world, from Hobart, Tasmania to Las Vegas, Nevada. He was pulling in $4,000 a week, sometimes playing alone, other times with blackjack teams. He took in $100k that year, and was living the gambler’s dream.

Three years later, tired of traveling and using fake identities and costumes to get into casinos where he’d been previously banned, he gave up the suitcase and headed back home. It was another two years before he took interest in a new gambling avenue.

In 1984, Woods and Benter traveled to Hong Kong, where this famous Aussie gambler’s career skyrocketed in a whole new direction – horse racing.

World Famous Horse Racing Syndicate

Woods and Benter formed a world famous gambling syndicate that revolved around horse racing. They had no idea just how successful their endeavor would become – the most successful ever witnessed in the racing industry – and they managed to pull it off without ever once attending a race track.

Putting their superior math skills to good use, they were able to develop a computer program that used all sorts of variables to determine the most probable winners of horse races. It took a couple of years – and $150k in losses – to work out some bugs in the system, but once they did, it was game on.

The program was incredibly advanced, especially considering the time period. It calculated all sorts of information, including each horse’s past performances, not just against other horses, but on different tracks. It took into account the type of track they would be racing at, their current physical form, the weather forecast for that day and much more.

For twenty years, Alan Woods and Bill Benter’s horse racing syndicate operated with phenomenal success in Hong Kong. Woods wasn’t even there most of those years. The two partners went their separate ways in 1987, when Woods decided to move on to Manila, Philippines.

Australia Alan Woods Worth $670 Million

It’s been estimated that the duo’s betting turnover was equal to 2% of the Hong Kong Jockey Club’s annual racing turnover. When the famous Aussie gambler past away on January 26, 2008, at the age of 62, his acquired wealth was calculated at AUD $670 million.

Due to the immense success with their horse race betting computer program, Alan Woods isn’t just considered one of the world’s best gamblers, but one of the most intelligent mathematicians of his time.

One year prior to his death in Hong Kong, Punting Ace opined that Woods saw racing as, “nothing more than a mathematical equation to be solved with all players nothing more than a never-ending string of numbers.”