Have you thought about just recording yourself talking with a few friends for hours and hours about it and uploading online (e.g. Youtube)?
(I don't gamble and never learned statistics, but I am interested occasionally and digging in more details "behind the headlines", so what's why I wouldn't mind listening to this.)
I might well do some video blogs actually - nice idea, thanks for giving me the thought!
Although the topic is very interesting, I fear that this might result in rambling, and a low density of information for the listener.
(Edit: getting the money matched only applies to bookies / betting exchanges, the equivalent problem for tote betting is that the price of winners will often be worse than your algorithms predicted)
Betfair and other exchanges provide more opportunity, but if your Kelly output is telling you to put £5k on a horse on a Tuesday evening AW track race, you are going to have to spend some time thinking about how you _actually_ do that without having the odds spiral in: markets respond to liquidity, and you are liquidity.
There are some papers on how to deal with this, but none of them have a solid answer. My solution was to put in the amount Kelly advised and if I didn't get fully matched, c'est la vie!
It sounds like a dream job, but actually, it's not. You start to tire of a sport you loved, and each morning you wake up with a pile of cash that you want to make a few percent bigger by the end of the day.
You're not adding anything to society, you have no colleagues, there's little to talk about with friends and family, and most people think you're a lazy bum.
Slowly your life becomes consumed - I was doing 16-17 hour days just moving money around and trading - your diet turns to crap and you start to resent what you're doing.
It's at that point you are vulnerable to "breaking the rules" and chasing losses, over-betting or doing other stupid things. Back then I did not have the resources to automate my strategies, so I lost £5k in 2-3 days about 9 months in and thought "time to get a proper job before I do some serious damage", and got back to working for a living.
I have since then automated many of my strategies and it's my favourite hobby, but I am under-capitalised and not interested in using other people's money: it will remain a hobby for some time yet, but I can get 10% RoI a month for some strategies, which definitely beats savings. Just need to wait for the bank to grow, and grow and grow... Maybe one day I will be a "professional gambler" again, but really it's just data science and software engineering for a very strange product.
I am enjoying it being a hobby right now, and I seem to be more comfortable calculating and assessing risk and pay-off than others which can be useful in an engineering team with an operations component.
So it's helped, but it's not my job, no.
It's no secret that it's possible to figure out which horse is going to win a race with reasonable statistical confidence.
The trick - and always has been - is making sure you can make a profit from it.
If a horse has a 30% chance of winning a race, and you're being offered odds as if it only has a 10% chance (i.e. 9/1), you have identified "value" or what Kelly Criterion would describe as "edge". You can mathematically in the long term make a profit, and Kelly can even tell you what %age of your bank to wager to optimise your expected returns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion
Identifying the "true" odds of an outcome and then identifying what odds you're prepared to take (adding an over-round), is a key piece to what bookmakers do when creating what they call "the tissue" - the opening odds they offer that is then adjusted to manage liabilities in line with incoming weight of money (WoM) from bettors.
Kelly was a colleague of Claude Shannon. His papers have stood up to the rigour of mathematical analysis and also make intuitive sense to those who spend enough time thinking about it.
It has successfully been applied in casinos (Blackjack system pioneer Edward Thorpe is/was a fan), bookmakers, hedge funds (Thorpe again, but many other funds apply Kelly too), and everything in between.
But here's the rub: you won't get to keep your edge for very long. Bookmakers, betting exchanges and parimutuel systems all adapt to deal with long-term winners. Your window of opportunity is limited. Already bookmakers have good systems for identifying true odds for English Premier League games and make a tidy sum on over-rounds (profit margins) as thin as 3% because they can eliminate value.
That said, as any fan of Sabremetrics will tell you, statistical analysis of a sport you love can be very rewarding and I would not put anybody off this if they already love the horses (as I still do).
Just tread carefully, and to make a long-term killing you're going to have to treat your setup like a hedge fund and always be moving around finding new edges.
I'm @p7r on Twitter if anybody wants to talk about this - I could talk for hours and hours and hours... :-)