I met a guy (I can give more details offline) who worked for an international gambling syndicate based in HK. Software written by teams in Shenzhen running on servers in HK fed by data from handicappers in Australia directed bettors to place bets at tracks all over the world. They were making something like 15-20% returns. As you can imagine, he had some crazy stories. At the time I was thinking about something similar (not horses) but eventually moved on to more respectable things (grad school.)
