So you are saying that the pokemon-stadium seasons in TwitchPlaysPokemon is illegal in some countries?
Also, what you said sounds like a system that makes it impossible to be a bookie without match-fixing, insider trading oddsing, or exorbitant fee percentages.
Not really. A bookie has to know a lot about the sport, of course, but keep in mind that:
(a) some pro bookies charge a fee upfront to place bets, whether you win or lose, so they only have to break even on the actual bets
(b) most events aren’t anywhere
near to being a sure thing, so the shortfall isn’t as extreme as portrayed here
(c) some events are multi-sided ones where there are more losers than winners (like horseraces), and even in single-sided events there are usually extra things to bet on which produce extra losing bets (like the final score of one of the teams, for example, or double events — “I bet that the Chicago Bears will win tomorrow
and the New York Giants will lose on Tuesday” — or bets placed in advance about performance of a team during the whole season, or how quickly the winner will win a multi-game playoff)
(d) most bookies offer odds on multiple events at the same time so they can use profits from one event to cover shortfalls on another
(e) a bookie is not actually obligated to give you favorable odds; if they want they can give you a bet where you get back less money if you win than you actually placed as the bet (so why would you bet? Maybe the bookie gives bonuses to people who win more often, or maybe they will close your account if you don’t bet at least once per week, or various other considerations — there are more casual betters hoping to get lucky than cold-blooded analytical types anyway)
(f) it is expected that professional bookies will offer worse odds (even going into unfavorable odds) when more people are betting on one side, although they usually have to honor the odds they gave you at the time you placed your bet regardless of what the later values were
and ultimately (g) a bookie doesn’t have to know the actual victory odds of the event if they know approximately how the
betting will go, which they generally have a good idea about from studying local betting history. (In a pure A vs. B match with no side bets, if you could somehow know in advance that 60% of the total amount bet will be for A to win and the rest for B to win, you would automatically turn a 10% profit, no matter who won, by offering 1:2 odds on A and 5:4 odds on B. Obviously, though, real life is more complex than that because the amounts bet are in part determined by the odds offered, and people will shy away from odds below 1:1. But figuring out how to compensate is not at all beyond the reach of fairly basic arithmetic, and with a computer to assist you an experienced person with a head for figures can make money doing it. It’s no harder than stock market trading — which it closely resembles in many ways — and people make money doing that, too.)