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Comment by caminante | Hacker News Reader

It's closer to a hedge fund finding asymmetries (e.g., under/over valued odds by bookmakers, bulk buying strategies when phone buying is turned off, etc.) plus some structural benefits (e.g., HK was a gambler's dream. Winnings were exempt from taxation! And the "pit boss" for the horse-racing scene wasn't kicking them out.)

These don't apply to all horse-racing scenes.

These advantages emerge, but get competed away.

Look at how the protagonists here were in black jack card counting teams. They do make money until they get blacklisted.

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If you have a large bankroll and a relationships with track staff etc, past posting would be an available system.

Or to put it another way, social engineering is usually a more reliable hack than technical means. I mean his card counting at blackjack was a team sport.

Hedge funds trade on inside information because making money is the goal. Not style points.

I only learned yesterday after reading this article that, apparently, a good many countries have no taxes on gambling wins. The reasoning is - again, from my quick bit of reading, if someone in the know wants to correct me please do - that most people lose, and the government doesn't want to be liable to help all the people who lose heavily.

Which is great for the pros, I suppose. Here's a list of countries, which you'd have to check individually, after I searched "gambling tax free countries":

    Austria
    Australia
    Belgium
    Bulgaria
    Canada
    Czech Republic
    Denmark
    Finland
    Germany
    Hungary
    Italy
    Luxembourg
    Malta
    Romania
    Sweden
    United Kingdom

Hmm, reading a bit more on the same article, i.e., this one here:

https://www.vegasmaster.com/gambling-tax-free-countries/

I see these relevant lines:

  > The laws concerning gambling tax around the world aren’t all black and white. In most cases, there is a sort of gray area which states that you will be taxed on winnings if gambling is your profession or your main source of income. However, if you gamble and win but you have a bigger source of income and don’t rely on professional gambling to pay the bills, you won’t be taxed.

  In other countries, like Kenya and Ireland, players aren’t taxed on their winnings, but bookies must pay a certain percentage of taxes on the total bets or winnings they record. In Ireland bookies must pay 1% on all bets placed through them, while in Kenya bookies have to pay 7.5% tax on all winnings they record.

I am to provide some context, in many of those countries people do not normally fill in tax reports, themselves, either. Lots of those countries have rather sophisticated regulations when it comes to gambling.

Take Italy which (along the UK) has one of the largest gambling market and the strictest regulations. Effectively every bet is sent to the regulator in near real time and some stuff like bringing money to the table (game) requires an explicit approval of the regular beforehand. To put it simply taxing the gambling firms, that already need a license, is much easier.

There are monthly reports, regulator mandated vaults that have to reflect the state of each player, including all bets and wins done, player (and operator) set limits (e.g deposit limits)

So overall not taxing the end user is a good choice, it just it's a lot more involved that just 'no taxation'

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