zlacker

>It's usually a combination of playing in a weird way and having some insight that the maker of the game (the oddsmaker) didn't see

Apparently exactly this. The people that I knew where always discussing the fitness of certain players and how that'd impact the game and stuff like that. Though it could've also been that they were on a long long lucky streak, because they minimized the risk with such considerations. At least t hey were not ruining their own lives

>>dailyk+(OP)
I have a friend who professionally plays video poker, and has been doing that for a very long time. He runs Monte Carlo simulations to find his strategies around various kinds of promotions and specials that casinos offer. He has about a 2-5% edge whenever he plays, and maximizes his bet size and machine time to take advantage of this. Casinos don't care about this sort of thing because the strategy he plays is usually batshit insane compared to how you would think video poker ought to be played (eg "throw away cards from a flush to mine for a straight flush" is a frequent rule he uses), and is very complicated. They lose ~$10k a week to the three people like him who can do this, but more than make up for it in the rubes that come in the door from those promotions.

These sorts of inefficiencies, and often even true arbitrage bets, show up in sports betting because the bets you need to make are so complicated. There is a team at Susquehanna that does sports gambling as their form of trading, and they will sometimes play these sorts of arbitrages against bookies. I remember hearing about a perfectly-hedged arbitrage of 8 different bets from one member of that team in a specific gambling forum, but the bets were all so arcane that very few other players were playing each one.