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Actually, you can... Betfair and many other betting exchanges allow you to do that. Maybe not accessible for most of you US-ians, but I'm not sure how access has been affected by your archaic anti-gambling stance over there.

I dabble in this a bit, and if I had time I'd do a lot more of it. There's a killing to be made from sports betting if you're prepared to put in the effort - I know one guy who paid off his mortgage years early by dabbling while he's at work, and at almost no financial risk.

I'd say it ticks all your boxes:
  - It's geeky because it involves probabilities and a fair bit of number-crunching;
  - You can do it from anywhere on your laptop, and at any time you like;
  - It's as lucrative as you want it to be.

There are a number of ways to approach this, but generally, betting exchanges such as Betfair are your friend. They have markets on every sport you can think of, as well as lots of other stuff like politics, reality TV shows, etc. etc. Choose a field that interests you and start to swot up.

What you have is basically an options market - you're buying and selling probabilities. You'll find varying amounts of liquidity, and some markets will be more volatile than others. Study them, learn how they tend to behave.

There are any number of strategies you can employ. If you want to take no risk at all, simply look for arbitrage - use sites like Oddschecker to spot when a bookmaker's offering a price that you can lay on the exchanges for guaranteed profit. This happens all the time - you'd be amazed. Usually it doesn't last long, though (I'm talking minutes), so you have to be quick off the mark.

Alternatively, you can just trade on the exchanges. Like any market, there is a spread between the back and lay prices of anything you can bet on, and all you have to do is back at longer odds than you lay, and you'll win whatever. In more volatile markets, you can cash in on market trends - for example, back a horse at a particular price and then lay it off when the odds shorten, hedging so that you win the same amount regardless of the outcome of the race. The trick here is to spot the likely direction of movement of the market and position yourself accordingly. You won't get it right all the time, but over time you learn.

Or if you fancy something a bit riskier, go head-to-head against the bookies. A friend of mine plays chess against a grand master who makes his living betting in-running on cricket. He does his own assessments of the state of play as the game goes on and calculates what he thinks the odds should be. When the bookie is out of step with his own calculations, he puts in money. Generally this just comes down to his opinion against that of the guy setting the odds at the bookies - and because he's smart he gets it right more often than they do. He says he makes about £500 a day tax-free out of this, and most bookies won't take his credit cards, so he gets my friend to open accounts for him and gives him 10% of his winnings!

There are other crazy tactics that some people use, such as backing horses in-running that are clearly going to win at odds of 1/100, i.e. you've got to put up £100 to win £1. An instant 1% return on investment sounds lucrative, especially if you're doing it twenty or thirty times in an afternoon, but sometimes a steward's enquiry sees the result of a race overturned and suddenly you're looking at a big loss. Effectively by doing this you're gambling on fewer than 1% of winning horses being disqualified.

Bottom line is that bookies get stuff wrong all the time and there's easy money to be made from their mistakes if you're smart and quick enough to spot them. You can feel your way into this by putting up a little bit of play money that you can afford to lose, and learn the ropes. If you're successful, your winnings will accumulate and you'll be able to play for bigger stakes. I'm not able to devote enough time to this to make a lot of money out of it, but I do turn a profit just by having half a brain. If you're able to dedicate yourself, the sky's the limit, and there's no risk.

Assuming you accept that sporting events are non-linear enough to ensure that there is NO practical way to determine the outcome beforehand, sports betting markets are actually one of the best demonstrations of the accuracy of the 'Wisdom of Crowds'.

Weight of money makes the market, especially on betting exchanges like Betfair, and any statistical analysis you care to do will show a very close relationship between prices and long-term frequency. As the only commodity being traded here is information, these markets are frighteningly efficient.

Local fans, blind favourite backers and coincidence bettors just add a little background noise, because despite their overwhelming numbers their stakes are pitifully small compared to 'real' players. If you analyze predicted outcome / actual outcome for a large sample of events on something like Betfair for example, you will be stunned how good the fit is.

(DISCLAIMER - Don't do this if you are a punter, it will depress the fuck out of you)

For anyone who doesn't know, John Reid thinks he can be next Prime Minister of the UK. His odds according to the betting exchanges are 1 in 20, and recently he has fucked things up by not building enough prisons. He's currently playing the "bash paedophiles" card, because he can't play the "leave the convicts to rot" card due to the fact that his party, err... forgot to build enough prisons, and he can't play the "keep the foreigners out" card because the country needs immigrants to keep the economy going.

A site like this: www.betfair.com can't be hosted in the US.

It is basically the same as trading in options; futures should be forbidden also.

One thing i will say is that you should give day trading / spread betting a go. It will really test your nerve and help you decide if you really want to go ahead with this

This is good advice, though I'd recommend playing with small stakes since both activities can chew you up and spit you out in double-quick time. If you're in a country where you are allowed access (which, unfortunately, exludes the US) I'd also recommend an account on Betfair. A UK horserace in the ten minutes before the off shows more activity than a stock market does all day. Ideal if you want to get your feet wet taking a position and looking to trade out.

With all the poker-bots and it being morally indefensible to allow suckers to keep their money, it stands to reason there is only a finite number of suckers, and even if there's a new one every minute, it takes suckers longer than a handfull of minutes to scrape togther enough money to get taken to the cleaners often enough to prop up such an industry.

I still don't understand why online poker is so damn popular - any game where the odds can be calculated with any degree of accuracy is ideal fodder for bots, which can patiently calculate hands until the heat death of the universe. Unfortunately US gambling laws prevent Americans from using sports betting sites like http://www.betfair.com/, which matches up bets between users, and though there are plenty of bots there they can't fleece people like poker bots because it's impossible to work out accurate odds for, say, Liverpool coming back from 3-0 down at half time to win the Champion's League.

peer to peer betting wins over all -- and you get better odds! check out betfair.com http://www.betfair.com/

The assassination of the King of Jordan sounds dramatic, but more mundane political changes have been bet on for a long time now. And in some cases in an ideas market system between individuals, not just solely with a traditional bookmaker. I know that Sporting Index and Betfair (the latter site seems to be rather IE-specific) have bets on the outcome of elections. A typical instrument might be one that pays $1 for every seat won by a political party in one parliamentary election - so if the party wins 200 seats you receive $200. Then the price this instrument trades at tells you the market's expectation of the result; a market-maker like Sporting Index might offer to buy the instrument at $300 and sell at $330. For Betfair, I think the price is solely determined by individuals.

As for whether anyone would want to place such bets, I can imagine that if you were the King's wife or close associate you might want to hedge against him being killed; in fact betting that he will be assassinated is just another form of life insurance. Or if you are the king's son and can't wait to succeed to the throne, bet that he won't be assassinated in the next 20 years, and on that future security borrow some money to fund your playboy lifestyle in the meantime.