The Big Fix. Brett Forrest

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      HONG KONG, PRESENT DAY

      Hong Kong’s Wooloomooloo Steakhouse attracts a busy lunchtime crowd. On the thirty-first floor of the Hennessy building, the restaurant overlooks Victoria Harbor, toward Kowloon and mainland China and all of the money that has transformed global sports betting.

      Patrick Jay works his way through a cut of meat. Jay is the head of the sportsbook at the Hong Kong Jockey Club. This may be the most profitable sportsbook in the world, though such rankings are impossible to calculate, given the nature of the business. Jay explains that the Hong Kong Jockey Club handles roughly $6.5 billion in betting on football per year. From its entire gambling portfolio, the book takes $1 billion in profit annually. The Hong Kong Jockey Club is the largest taxpayer in Hong Kong, representing 8 percent of the local budget.

      Jay is a tall, large-boned man, with the gregarious and happily ravenous manner of someone whose strategic decisions have guided him to a windfall. He projects the attitude of that rare animal, the winning gambler. Jay is one of an expanding cast of Englishmen come east. They carry expertise in the traditional, respected, English way of making a book – at shops like Ladbrokes and William Hill – and they now apply these business principles to Asia, where their experienced hand is welcomed. The Asian market has grown exponentially in the last decade. Jay estimates that the market represented about $100 billion at the turn of the millennium. Today, he says, Asian gamblers wager $1 trillion on sports per year. “The numbers are absolutely unfathomable to everybody,” Jay says. “People back in the U.K. don’t believe it. If you show them financial numbers, they say, ‘You’re making this up. You got Enron to do your accounting for you.’ ” It is not only the size and growth of the Chinese economy that has attracted so many in Western gaming. Nor would adventure be a sufficient motive for someone as oriented to business as Jay to relocate this far from home. It is habit most of all that draws people in Jay’s line – Chinese habit, the role that gambling plays in Asian cultures, the well-documented acquaintance with risk. This, as much as Asian economic dynamism, is the guarantor of continued growth in the gambling business. Jay’s research tells him that in Hong Kong, locals allocate upward of two and a half times more of their disposable income for gambling than do people in the United Kingdom. “Asia is not the center of the universe,” Jay says. “Asia is the universe.”

      Jay’s sportsbook is located at, unsurprisingly, a racetrack. It is public, open, legal. And it is categorized in the minority. Throughout nearly all of Asia, the most active gambling continent, gambling is illegal. It is illegal to bet on sports on mainland China, for this activity is antithetical to the precepts of the communist state. The Muslim religion does not permit gambling for Indonesia’s 250 million people. This doesn’t mean that legal statutes prevent gambling. On the contrary, illegal, unregulated bookies in China, Indonesia, and all across Asia predominate. Jay claims that the illegal betting market is ten times larger than the legal market. Of the $1 trillion total, he says that $900 billion is wagered in the dark, administered by the criminal entities that finance, regulate, and enforce a parallel industry.

      At Wooloomooloo, lunch draws to a close, and Patrick Jay readies to make a demonstrative point. “Look around the restaurant,” he says. “What do you see?” There are tables full of what appear to be businessmen in the midst of congenial lunch meetings. There are a few romantic couples sharing their little moments. At other tables, friends speak loudly with one another, then laugh. It is the usual steakhouse crowd, but for one missing element. “No booze,” Jay says. He’s right. Plates of steaks and potatoes cover the tabletops, but no single glass of beer or whiskey accompanies them. “These people don’t spend their money on alcohol. They gamble.”

      China’s market reforms of the late twentieth century incited one of the most remarkable periods of localized economic growth that the world has ever experienced. Throughout the 1990s, the Chinese economy grew at a rate of roughly 10 percent per year. In rapid fashion, this swelling generated both great personal wealth for some individuals and general liquidity in Chinese society.

      While this miraculous event was unfolding, so was an episode of even greater global significance and revelation. During this period, the Internet was growing from a computer engineer’s curiosity into the world’s primary means of commerce and communication. At the moment that many millions of Chinese people all of a sudden possessed disposable income, there was a new place to play with it. When these fortunate Chinese considered how they might float their new wealth for the enjoyment and risk that had long been a central part of their culture, they were presented with a growing number of gambling options online.

      The emergence of the Internet not only precipitated the growth of online betting sites, but also improved options for the gambler. Before the Internet, the corner-store bookie, such as Ladbrokes, had little incentive to СКАЧАТЬ