It's much simpler than that. Although the show appears in the beginning like it's a "magic trick" (though that is never actually claimed), in the end the audience is clearly shown how there's no trick at all. It's all simple probability and there really is no way to "beat the odds". Which IMHO is ultimately more entertaining and valuable than just some slight of hand or magic trickery.

I'm on a bit of a probability (gambling, sports betting, stats, etc) kick these days, and I'd be interested in reading more about people and companies doing this in practice. I'd been imagining there must be organised sports gamblers, but they don't seem to be overly searchable.

Internally they track how much each account wins & loses. If you win too much, the site gives you worse and worse odds until eventually you’re banned entirely. The reverse is also true: if you’re a terrible better, the site gives you better odds hoping to keep you coming back for more.

They have a whole team whose job it is to instantly block smart betters from opening new accounts. Accounts opened in the name of their girlfriends is the classic thing they watch out for.

Some of the smartest gamblers also get hired as quants, and help figure out what the odds should be on the site.

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.

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'

As it’s a betting exchange they don’t care if you win or lose as you aren’t winning money from them, but they start to take steeper cuts of your profits if you’re a regular winner above some threshold that a random punter is very unlikely to hit.

Whether it beats the bookmaker’s margin I wouldn’t know.

You're welcome

I actually did a little bit of private investigation myself into betting markets of a handful of sports a number of years ago out of both curiosity, and potentially profit. And I'm currently working on perceptions of skill and merit along various systems just for my own intellectual project.

I find it interesting you've discovered the systematic bias strategy of choosing your opponents and events (these are done both consciously by players in various systems, but often formally and informally supported or enabled by various governing bodies and competitive structures).

Aside from both the boredom (arbitraging and scraping stats can be meticulously dull especially in fields you have no interest in or if you lack a hustler or profit maximising mentality or significant bankroll), opportunity cost (how much you can earn in other markets with such skills given equal investment of time and safety), the moral question (you're taking money from other ignorant bettors and I personally consider a lot of gambling and exploitation of people's ignorance relatively immoral, the house/market maker in many contexts still profits just through sheer trading frequency or other profit making actions), these days you have many market makers targeting little sharps presumably because they want to keep their ignorant base happy and gambling and don't want the perception of playing agaist certain losses or against people capable of seeing through the systems to reveal internal operations.

That's the only reason I can come up with for why they target and close accounts of profitable gamblers while they're still taking the house edge on every bet as profit.

What I (of course) also informally discovered in some markets I looked into was evidence of various fixing activities and systemic biases.

Now if you were going to do this for large scale profit, one of the things you are going to have to do is stop the illusion you're modelling skill and start modelling corruption.

It's all well and good for these articles to come out and pretend skilled prediction will win you millions, but you can be the best statistician in the house and if you place bets in a game based on models of skill, but the game outcome is rigged, you can kiss goodbye to your bankroll.

Criminals win because their outcomes aren't statistical or based on skill.

And now you're suddenly in the business of modelling and fighting people who profit from rigging markets rather than morally neutral statistical models in games of skill.

You can of course model such and go down that rabbit hole, but at some point you either buy into such a world and get involved (either by being hired by or interacting with criminal and questionable enterprise) or you are effectively trying to do statistical surveillance of criminal activities... Which will then show up in the statistical patterns of your own betting activities and potentially alert said enterprises to your existence.

And that's about where I bowed out of my investigations and turned back to more theoretical work.

That's not particularly a world I want to be involved in, but I am relatively confident popular sports and markets have illicit match fixing and other activities going on in them at significant levels, but I'm not interested in fighting with or building implicit knowledge bases of people who have million dollar anonymous backers from Vegas, billion dollar contracts, and whom die from accidental sleeping pill overdoses... If you know what I mean ...