Future of sports betting: The bettors
(Snip)
"Sports wagering is just a math problem," said a high-level bettor, who is active in the global market and spoke with ESPN on the condition of anonymity. "Most syndicates are already using various forms of machine learning."
In the future, the most-sophisticated bettors won't be human -- they'll be robots.
These betting bots, used by elite betting groups, will be fast, powerful and have terabytes of data flowing through them. If an NFL point spread gets off-kilter or a live scout transmits the result of an obscure, low-level tennis match before the books know it, the bots can unleash a firestorm of bets all over the world. Soon, they'll be able to outsmart humans.
(Snip)
In a nutshell, here's how the robots operate: Sophisticated forecasting models convert event probabilities into prices (i.e. The Green Bay Packers as a -150 favorite have an implied win probability of 60 percent). If the market price differs from the model price enough to withstand the vig or commission, the difference represents an opportunity. And the opportunity is pursued almost instantaneously through the use elaborate trading software that accommodates both speed and volume.
Professor Adam Kucharski, a London mathematician who researched scientific approaches to betting in his new book, "The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck out of Gambling," says high-tech bettors primarily take two different approaches with their bots.
"The first involves hooking up robots directly to the betting exchange servers. This means bettors can jump on any mispriced odds almost instantly," Kucharski said. "The second approach is to carefully develop scientific predictions, then place a traditional bet in the market. This is hard, given limits on betting. If you have a small edge, you need to put down a lot of money to make it worthwhile. That is why many syndicates opt for the big Asian markets, where people are happy to take large bets."
http://www.espn.com/chalk/story/_/id/17900400/the-future-sports-betting-bettors-landscape-legalized-sports-betting-us
= new reply since forum marked as read
With all that implies in terms of manipulation. 
On the other hand, maybe we could try out the financial transaction tax in this realm before moving on to Wall Street. 