One thing that i don't see in automated horse betting is the work to look at the horses before the race.
You can get a sense of a horses energy and condition on the day (it can be different on different days). Horse racing even has a parade ring before the race for this reason. I don't gamble but i'm absolutely sure there's signal there in visually looking at the horse on the day that these systems don't take into account.
I wouldn't at all be surprised if a system could be far more successful by using vision of the parade ring (whether machine vision or expert human) as additional signal.
In fact given my experience with horses (grew up on a farm) and knowing the day to day differences i'd be surprised if any pure algorithmic system could beat the marker without the above since those who do bet on horses absolutely use this signal.
GreyZephyr · 19h ago
This is used by a number of betting syndicates. Notable by David Walsh[0] and Zjelko [1]. They knew of and worked with Benter in HK and adapted his system. One of the things that they did was pay large numbers of experts to watch and evaluate each horse and give it a standardised rating which they then used as an extra parameter along with the public odds. Another gambler who also extended that system out was Alan Woods [2], but I don't think he did anything as sophisticated in terms of modeling, concentrating more on the execution side. Regarding the yearly turnover, I have no idea, but billions would be on the low end. From the ATO filings we David Walsh alone was generating 100's of millions of dollars a year in profits, let alone turnover.
I used to sit on a trading desk, the kind with loads of guys sitting next to each other and about 8 screens each. Lots of noise, except when it got quiet. When it did get quiet, someone would shout down the squawk box that they had "heard from the stable boys" about some horse that was on form.
You couldn't not bet on this horse. Everyone did it, and everyone got fleeced, every time.
One day, my boss decides he's had enough of this crap, and he goes "no, I ain't doing it, I lose my lunch money every fkn time, screw this".
Horse comes in at 30-1, everyone is paying him a visit asking about what champagne to buy that day.
callamdelaney · 1d ago
I think that that is likely a low confidence indicator, extremely subjective and hard to measure.
fallinditch · 17h ago
If you fed archive video of many parade rings, together with the results of that race, then you could use deep learning to develop a neural net program that could (maybe) beat the odds by interpreting a live video feed of a parade ring to predict the likely winner.
So what do you think, could this work? Presumably the technology to build this system is reasonably accessible these days.
blindriver · 1d ago
The point is that it doesn’t matter.
jeffreyrogers · 1d ago
Benter allegedly did use something like this in his later models so it probably does matter.
beepbopboopp · 1d ago
You should go look at Nikola Jokic and Russell Westbrook before a game and see if you can guess which player has won 2/3 of the most recent MVP awards, both in pregame energy and physiognomy.
Winners in almost all sports mostly dont present the same.
randomcarbloke · 9h ago
how do you quantify that?
specialist · 6h ago
My bro was (is?) a gambler. As kids, I'd tag along for giggles. We definitely spied the parade ring. Which horse was most like a wound up spring? Which horses defecated/urinate immediately prior?
It was fun pretending we had insight.
My farm-boy father never bet on the horses, certain it was all rigged.
bitshiftfaced · 1d ago
This reminds me of an anecdote out of one of Thorp's papers (2007). He joined forces with a computer science Ph.D and started sports betting. They were very profitable, but he listed three reasons why he stopped: 1) it required having someone in Vegas placing bets, 2) he believed it was risky to have someone going around with large amounts of cash in order to make bets, and 3) it wasn't competitive with his stock market trading strategy. He mentions how his belief about #2 unfortunately turned out to be correct, as apparently something happened in another group's operation.
AnotherGoodName · 1d ago
I'm always skeptical of these "i totally made money gambling i just stopped for other reasons" type of claims and for good reason.
So it seems he was full of shit right? He was saying what he needed to say to get investors and when those investors fell for it he did not deliver.
Sold a lot of books though...
srean · 1d ago
Your calling him out makes you look ignorant.
Thorpe is a dyed in wool information theory, probability theory academic who happens to be a super cool hacker at heart *.
Among his many accomplishments are, him obtaining a more general version of Black-Scholes model, independently and before Black, Scholes and Mertens had derived theirs. You may recall that got them the Nobel prize.
Managing money and breaking Las Vegas casinos were one of his, side, and mostly academic, entertainments.
There is a nice story of him visiting Shannon to discuss an information theory research paper that he, Thorpe, was writing. The meeting had taken a lot effort to schedule -- Shannon was a busy man, already a celebrity. But then they ended up over-extending their scheduled meeting, discussing, brainstorming with playful eagerness, different mathematical methods to break several popular gambling games, starting with Blackjack. Turns out Shannon was a sucker for such entertaining hacks. (This would be one of the first formulations of card counting [0]) Thorpe and his students would then try these out in Vegas.
*Taking things apart logically, to probe where things break, to understand how they work, that's as quintessentially an exercise in hacking as you can get.
Prof Thorpe wrote about and proved his strategies along with characterizing the assumptions under which they would and had worked.
Finally, you are you and then there is Prof. Thorpe.
There's a story about him buying one of the very first available transistors in the late 1950s in order to predict roulette outcomes.
srean · 1d ago
Yes. His autobiography is such an interesting read. Gives us a glimpse into how it was to grow up during the great depression.
lordnacho · 1d ago
One thing I took note of was that he was a chemistry nerd in school.
It seems like the subject of nerd culture changed from waaay back when he was a kid being chemistry (you could make bombs), to electronics such as radio (you could do ham radio), to computers and then programming (video games).
Nowadays you won't find anyone who can tell you how chemistry works, and a few old guys will tell you how to solder your own electronics, but everyone will be able to tell you how to code a website.
srean · 1d ago
Good observations on shifting nerdismo.
On the otherhand, how can one not yield to the temptation of synthesizing some harmless nitrocellulose in the chemistry lab, or some flash powder.
"Experimenting" with the flash powder set my socks on fire while I was temporarily blinded. I was not expecting that. Fun times.
Was also perhaps career focused on latest tech?? For example my granddad did structural engineering, my father studied chemical engineering, I did electronic engineering
DistractionRect · 1d ago
It reads to me like he had he simple (relative to today) investment strategies which where profitable, and closed shop when those market inefficiencies started running dry.
skippyboxedhero · 1d ago
He was also, at that point, very old. He started his first fund in 1968. It tells you something about the modern world that you can your fund successfully for three decades, accumulate one of the best all-time records, and you will still have people online call you useless if you bow out in your 70s when your returns go dry for a couple of years.
jeffreyrogers · 1d ago
He had a sharpe ratio similar to early Rentech and used much less leverage. Probably would have had similar returns to them if if he used similar amounts of leverage. From interviews with him he seems extremely risk averse. Alumni of his fund now run one of the few firms that could be considered a Rentech peer.
skippyboxedhero · 1d ago
No, not full of shit. One of the most well-known investors in the world, worth $1bn, and he wrote papers on sports betting as well.
All of the things he mentions are massive problems with making money from gambling. All of the large gamblers in the US use beards, it is time-consuming and you are generally dealing with gambling addicts who are unreliable. The situation in HK was unique (and the people Benter partnered with proved to be very unreliable anyway when they began making large amounts of money).
IncreasePosts · 1d ago
His first hedge fund ran for 20 years, and then his second one 8 years, during which he had very positive returns, but the strategy he used stopped working in 2002 (probably because everyone else jumped on it too).
steeeeeve · 1d ago
If you have an algorithmic edge, eventually it will stop working. If it's a really good one, your trades become someone else's edge. The market is constantly changing and active traders are constantly looking at what's going on and trying to take advantage. The more I looked into trading, the more it was just a sea of "Use these charts", "don't really trust these charts", and "once you lose a ton of money, you'll get a feel for things"
You have the market itself which is like the environment, it can go hot or cold based on broad trends, and if that's all their was fundamentals would likely work well.
The problem is there the dumb prey you feed on may adapt and remove your niche you fit in. Even worse is there is no shortage of predators watching you and waiting for you to make a mistake and they'll eat you alive.
dgfitz · 22h ago
> I'm always skeptical of these "i totally made money gambling i just stopped for other reasons" type of claims and for good reason.
I understand why you think that. I am a small time gambler on sports, purely American football. I start each season with 10 bucks and end with 5k-20k.
And then I stop, until the next season starts.
Really fucks up my taxes.
jebarker · 7h ago
Not asking for your secrets, but is your success a product of intimate knowledge of the game/team/players with you making individually chosen bets or some kind of automated system?
Dylan16807 · 18h ago
And you don't upgrade that to "$10 or 10% of what I won last year, whichever is bigger" because...?
LgWoodenBadger · 19h ago
In what way does/would/could it “fuck up your taxes?”
PaulHoule · 1d ago
I play the Dr. Z system [1] by the seat of my pants when I go to the track (got family who are always inviting me to the racino.)
The basic idea is that more people are in the win pool so the odds to win are more accurate (as a probability estimator) than the odds to place and show (finishing second and third.) If you compute probability estimates for place and show based on the win probabilities you sometimes find that place or show are underbet on the favorites. Maybe one to three races a day have a good betting opportunity.
Dr. Z's books have a number of tables for what you should do heuristically that he got from doing simulations. I have a Python script that simulates all race outcomes and points out good opportunities that I've been thinking of recoding for my HP Alpha calculator. Practically I will do a hand-waving calculation based on the ratio of the win to place and show odds for the favorite and just bet that way.
Th trouble with it is you only get to bet a few times a day and most people want more action that that. You tend to win most of the time because you are betting on the favorite [2] and (roughly) you have three times as many ways to win betting the favorite to show than you do the win. You don't win very much when you win, however, so just a few losses can eat up what you win.
You can't really make a living this way and I think if you've got the grindset to do this one seriously you can apply the same skills and attitude to currency options or something like that and make a lot more money.
[2] actually the favorite is underbet so it would be a winning strategy to always bet on the favorite if it wasn't for the track taking a cut
tlyleung · 1d ago
Author here - funny to see this posted after a few years. Happy to answer any questions!
GreyZephyr · 19h ago
Did you ever try extending it out to other methods of probability estimation other than the forms of regression? I have only skimmed your excellent article, but I think you are first calculating the average probabilities from a regression model and then minimizing the loss to calculate Harville corrections for place and show markets? Is that correct or am I missing something here? I guess I am curious if there has been any improvement on using regressions for combining the various initial odds as I don't really follow the literature anymore.
jeffreyrogers · 1d ago
How did you choose the artworks for the artworks section of your site?
fidotron · 1d ago
Great write up. [am idiot]
tlyleung · 1d ago
Sorry - to be clear this is just re-running the model detailed in Bill Benter’s 1995 paper (he uses the time period 1986-1993) on more recent time periods (1996-2003, 2006-2013, 2016-2023) using PyTorch.
markoman · 17h ago
Nice work. Have you made available the CSV of this data, or is it easily obtainable using horse racing information online? I didn't see how that HKJC site offered it in CSV format. Perhaps you scraped the data to generate your CSV? Thank you.
4gotunameagain · 1d ago
Please read the first paragraph of the post again. The original author of the paper is Bill Benter, and the GP is the author of this excellent writeup.
elpakal · 1d ago
> Four of the five seasons resulted in net profits, the loss incurred during the losing season being approximately 20% of starting capital. A strong upward trend in rate of return has been observed as improvements were made to the handicapping model.
For anyone interested in the results
jeffreyrogers · 1d ago
Algorithmic betting is widespread in horse racing now. I can't remember the exact figures but I think it's estimated to be about 40% of the total handle. There is a company that will allow individuals to connect directly to the betting pools and wager automatically. It's rumored that the biggest two bettors are betting over $1bn a year (of course a lot of that is recycled from prior payouts).
WalterBright · 1d ago
If you bet on horses, you are betting against the tide (the house cut). If you bet on stocks, you are betting with the tide (a growing economy).
I prefer the latter.
srean · 1d ago
Are their big barriers to entry to become a booky ?
One would assume it would be quite attractive to become one if he enjoys gambling. One gets to participate in the action and make money no matter which horse wins -- as long as they manage the edge right.
nssnsjsjsjs · 23h ago
Do you mean the person at the tracks taking odds or a business doing online bookmaking.
Being a bookie would be fun if you like maths, are street smart, somewhat not highly ethical but you are disciplined and can control your emotions. Similar to poker I guess. And are knowledgeable about the sport with respect to odds not trivia.
I doubt a typical gambler would enjoy it. Does a "foodie" love working in a lab testing flour samples?
srean · 13h ago
I stand corrected.
gkilmain · 1d ago
The biggest barrier is finding customers.
nssnsjsjsjs · 23h ago
Absolutely but there are smart people in horses with enough of an edge to hire staff in the dozens, and those staff be at the higher end of office setup, perks, socials etc.
msarrel · 5h ago
I see a lot of comments here from people saying that how a horse looks and behaves on the day of the race is irrelevant. I suspect those people have never been involved in horse racing. It's comforting to believe that statistics tell the entire story, but it isn't true.
gosub100 · 1d ago
Keep in mind if you found a profitable algorithm today, you would have to put a lot of care into concealing your bets. Casinos in the US will ban you from playing if you consistently win. And if they catch you structuring your bets they can deny your payout on winning tickets. You might get away with it for a year or so, but in any sportsbook, if they see your face daily and figure out you're consistently winning, (and not just playing for entertainment) don't expect it to last.
Edit: this was a great video about online casinos and several accounts of people who were blocked for winning too much or structuring at in-person casinos:
Horse racing differs from most sports betting in the US because it predominantly uses pari-mutuel wagering where the house takes a fixed percentage of each wagering pool. Accordingly, the house is incentivized to encourage bettors to place larger bets, since their piece only grows.
nikcub · 1d ago
There is a professional gambler in Australia[0] who has the betting companies _compete_ for his business and offer him rebates on volume. His firm is double-digit percentage of the Australian betting market and employs ~hundreds of professional traders, developers etc. (it operates no diff to a hedge fund).
As an aside - it was his firm that was responsible for the recent "breaking" of the Texas lottery[1]
True, but it detracts from the enjoyment of everyone else by reducing payouts if algo players come in. Why place a bet on a multi-race jackpot if you know you're going to share it with multiple algo bettors? Why stand in line at the kiosk or sports book to play for fun if you have to wait exceptionally long because an algo bettor is boxing a bunch of picks and taking a long time? The longshots won't pay as much either because an algo will signal a positive EV. They're less likely to buy drinks or racing forms too.
primeradical · 1d ago
The algo bettors aren't using kiosks at the track. They're using dashboards and monitoring live video feeds. At least in my experience in the US.
Most of the serious younger bettors are feeding daily form PDFs into an LLM and getting analysis, and placing bets using custom apps, rarely using UIs from the larger ADWs (advanced deposit wagering company). Older bettors are using phone wagering for larger bets.
There is never a shortage of kiosks available for casual fans. Most tracks are either owned or partnered with ADWs that all have mobile apps, or sites for placing wagers, and casuals are encouraged to use those as they're more sticky after they leave the track.
Even if algo bettors are influencing the odds because they're throwing money around, the house doesn't care because its percentage cut is the same (parimutual), and the casuals aren't bothered because they can't even tell what's happening.
The totes are the ones analyzing fraud and abuse, and they don't care what tea leaves you read to place bets. They just care about avoiding government oversight and ensuring profits for the ADWs and tracks.
Source, formerly a SWE for an ADW
skippyboxedhero · 1d ago
It doesn't, more efficient lines = better odds for punters. That is why Pinny/Asian books have better odds. The worst experience for gamblers is one with significant government intervention and/or limited professional involvement because there is no price discovery. Bookies don't just return that value to customers, in practice, they spend it on wildly expensive marketing, this means they have to offer lower payouts, and then spend inordinate amounts of time and money stopping professionals picking off their shitty lines.
mathattack · 1d ago
The inefficiencies eventually get “found out” by the algo traders and they compete away the alpha. Eventually they start losing money because of the house’s edge.
The house loses if all the suckers are driven out, and it’s just algo, because then the algos leave.
sitkack · 1d ago
So the suckers are the ones injecting liquidity into the market?
plantain · 1d ago
The opposite is true - the betting companies want algo traders to come and make the markets for them. They get reduced fees and bonuses for making the market.
skippyboxedhero · 1d ago
This isn't true. Very few places in the US run their books this way, and those that do limit your bet so most large bettors are still using beards. If you bet with someone who is moderately capable, for example Pinny, they will limit you then use your bets to reverse-engineer your strategy. Asian books are the only place where you can get action and, now, certain syndicates have become so large and dominant that they open lines earlier just for them. If you are only betting on outcomes, it is very hard to beat a line set by syndicate.
farceSpherule · 1d ago
You can make money on horses if you know what you are doing. You have to have a betting strategy and have to stick to the strategy.
You go to the track with $X and your strategy. When you are done, you leave. You do not stay and keep betting with your winnings.
farceSpherule · 1d ago
Down vote me all you want. You all can piss off.
One of my family members - a successful General Dynamics mid-level exec - made a business out of horse racing and his handicapping strategy.
He set up an LLC, paid a software engineer to, at that time, write a software program that would download horse and track stats from all of the available sources. The software would also ask for betting and other strategies from my family member.
He would go to the track, bet his strategy, and leave.
He easily made ~$100,000 a year from this venture. He also took full advantage of the the tax benefits because he made it look and act like a business.
fn-mote · 22h ago
The downvotes are probably because the GP post gives no details about the strategy being used, making it sound like any strategy could be successful if only you would take the winnings and leave instead of continuing to bet.
You can get a sense of a horses energy and condition on the day (it can be different on different days). Horse racing even has a parade ring before the race for this reason. I don't gamble but i'm absolutely sure there's signal there in visually looking at the horse on the day that these systems don't take into account.
I wouldn't at all be surprised if a system could be far more successful by using vision of the parade ring (whether machine vision or expert human) as additional signal.
In fact given my experience with horses (grew up on a farm) and knowing the day to day differences i'd be surprised if any pure algorithmic system could beat the marker without the above since those who do bet on horses absolutely use this signal.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Walsh_(art_collector) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeljko_Ranogajec [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Woods_(gambler)
I used to sit on a trading desk, the kind with loads of guys sitting next to each other and about 8 screens each. Lots of noise, except when it got quiet. When it did get quiet, someone would shout down the squawk box that they had "heard from the stable boys" about some horse that was on form.
You couldn't not bet on this horse. Everyone did it, and everyone got fleeced, every time.
One day, my boss decides he's had enough of this crap, and he goes "no, I ain't doing it, I lose my lunch money every fkn time, screw this".
Horse comes in at 30-1, everyone is paying him a visit asking about what champagne to buy that day.
So what do you think, could this work? Presumably the technology to build this system is reasonably accessible these days.
Winners in almost all sports mostly dont present the same.
It was fun pretending we had insight.
My farm-boy father never bet on the horses, certain it was all rigged.
Looking him up it looks like he managed to start and subsequently close (due to low returns) hedge funds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_O._Thorp#Stock_market
So it seems he was full of shit right? He was saying what he needed to say to get investors and when those investors fell for it he did not deliver.
Sold a lot of books though...
Thorpe is a dyed in wool information theory, probability theory academic who happens to be a super cool hacker at heart *.
Among his many accomplishments are, him obtaining a more general version of Black-Scholes model, independently and before Black, Scholes and Mertens had derived theirs. You may recall that got them the Nobel prize.
Managing money and breaking Las Vegas casinos were one of his, side, and mostly academic, entertainments.
There is a nice story of him visiting Shannon to discuss an information theory research paper that he, Thorpe, was writing. The meeting had taken a lot effort to schedule -- Shannon was a busy man, already a celebrity. But then they ended up over-extending their scheduled meeting, discussing, brainstorming with playful eagerness, different mathematical methods to break several popular gambling games, starting with Blackjack. Turns out Shannon was a sucker for such entertaining hacks. (This would be one of the first formulations of card counting [0]) Thorpe and his students would then try these out in Vegas.
*Taking things apart logically, to probe where things break, to understand how they work, that's as quintessentially an exercise in hacking as you can get.
Prof Thorpe wrote about and proved his strategies along with characterizing the assumptions under which they would and had worked.
Finally, you are you and then there is Prof. Thorpe.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_counting#History
It seems like the subject of nerd culture changed from waaay back when he was a kid being chemistry (you could make bombs), to electronics such as radio (you could do ham radio), to computers and then programming (video games).
Nowadays you won't find anyone who can tell you how chemistry works, and a few old guys will tell you how to solder your own electronics, but everyone will be able to tell you how to code a website.
On the otherhand, how can one not yield to the temptation of synthesizing some harmless nitrocellulose in the chemistry lab, or some flash powder.
"Experimenting" with the flash powder set my socks on fire while I was temporarily blinded. I was not expecting that. Fun times.
Yeah: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43742108
Was also perhaps career focused on latest tech?? For example my granddad did structural engineering, my father studied chemical engineering, I did electronic engineering
All of the things he mentions are massive problems with making money from gambling. All of the large gamblers in the US use beards, it is time-consuming and you are generally dealing with gambling addicts who are unreliable. The situation in HK was unique (and the people Benter partnered with proved to be very unreliable anyway when they began making large amounts of money).
You have the market itself which is like the environment, it can go hot or cold based on broad trends, and if that's all their was fundamentals would likely work well.
The problem is there the dumb prey you feed on may adapt and remove your niche you fit in. Even worse is there is no shortage of predators watching you and waiting for you to make a mistake and they'll eat you alive.
I understand why you think that. I am a small time gambler on sports, purely American football. I start each season with 10 bucks and end with 5k-20k.
And then I stop, until the next season starts.
Really fucks up my taxes.
The basic idea is that more people are in the win pool so the odds to win are more accurate (as a probability estimator) than the odds to place and show (finishing second and third.) If you compute probability estimates for place and show based on the win probabilities you sometimes find that place or show are underbet on the favorites. Maybe one to three races a day have a good betting opportunity.
Dr. Z's books have a number of tables for what you should do heuristically that he got from doing simulations. I have a Python script that simulates all race outcomes and points out good opportunities that I've been thinking of recoding for my HP Alpha calculator. Practically I will do a hand-waving calculation based on the ratio of the win to place and show odds for the favorite and just bet that way.
Th trouble with it is you only get to bet a few times a day and most people want more action that that. You tend to win most of the time because you are betting on the favorite [2] and (roughly) you have three times as many ways to win betting the favorite to show than you do the win. You don't win very much when you win, however, so just a few losses can eat up what you win.
You can't really make a living this way and I think if you've got the grindset to do this one seriously you can apply the same skills and attitude to currency options or something like that and make a lot more money.
[1] https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dr-zs-beat-the-racetrack-wi...
[2] actually the favorite is underbet so it would be a winning strategy to always bet on the favorite if it wasn't for the track taking a cut
For anyone interested in the results
I prefer the latter.
One would assume it would be quite attractive to become one if he enjoys gambling. One gets to participate in the action and make money no matter which horse wins -- as long as they manage the edge right.
Being a bookie would be fun if you like maths, are street smart, somewhat not highly ethical but you are disciplined and can control your emotions. Similar to poker I guess. And are knowledgeable about the sport with respect to odds not trivia.
I doubt a typical gambler would enjoy it. Does a "foodie" love working in a lab testing flour samples?
Edit: this was a great video about online casinos and several accounts of people who were blocked for winning too much or structuring at in-person casinos:
https://youtu.be/unksvJ1JfDE?si=u1tUH285geBykfrC
As an aside - it was his firm that was responsible for the recent "breaking" of the Texas lottery[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeljko_Ranogajec
[1] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/investigations/article...
Most of the serious younger bettors are feeding daily form PDFs into an LLM and getting analysis, and placing bets using custom apps, rarely using UIs from the larger ADWs (advanced deposit wagering company). Older bettors are using phone wagering for larger bets.
There is never a shortage of kiosks available for casual fans. Most tracks are either owned or partnered with ADWs that all have mobile apps, or sites for placing wagers, and casuals are encouraged to use those as they're more sticky after they leave the track.
Even if algo bettors are influencing the odds because they're throwing money around, the house doesn't care because its percentage cut is the same (parimutual), and the casuals aren't bothered because they can't even tell what's happening.
The totes are the ones analyzing fraud and abuse, and they don't care what tea leaves you read to place bets. They just care about avoiding government oversight and ensuring profits for the ADWs and tracks.
Source, formerly a SWE for an ADW
The house loses if all the suckers are driven out, and it’s just algo, because then the algos leave.
You go to the track with $X and your strategy. When you are done, you leave. You do not stay and keep betting with your winnings.
One of my family members - a successful General Dynamics mid-level exec - made a business out of horse racing and his handicapping strategy.
He set up an LLC, paid a software engineer to, at that time, write a software program that would download horse and track stats from all of the available sources. The software would also ask for betting and other strategies from my family member.
He would go to the track, bet his strategy, and leave.
He easily made ~$100,000 a year from this venture. He also took full advantage of the the tax benefits because he made it look and act like a business.