[Dn_Ab]

If it wouldn't trouble you to do so, could you go into more detail please? Do you have experience with this?

You are saying that any sport event, in particular those that are in play actually have some statistical mineable property with profitably exploitable strategies? If this is the case, with such a low barrier should this not be a game with zero expectation in the long run (maybe negative if there are minimum bet rules)? Whatever distribution that can be learned would have much higher variance than your typical intra day trades no? And while these techniques may be similar in spirit, do the fundamentals map sufficiently? As they say, the devil is in the details. but I speak from ignorance.

[ig1]

I've messed around a little bit with it, but I know some of my quant friends do it more seriously. There's definitely ways of making money of betfair, you even occasionally have arbitrage opportunities across the different markets on betfair.

I think the fundamentals are close enough that it's a useful place to learn. You're not going to be able to take a method that works on Betfair and apply it to a real market, but a lot of the statistical mining/predictions techniques you can use of betfair are exactly the same as those used in real markets.