Every site that publishes an rss feed is making a second copy of their content. How you're displaying it on the front page may or may not have some impact ... if you're using a frame or javascript, those are basically invisible to search engines. On the other hand if it's a CMS writing html on your home page from the rss, I still don't think that's going to bring any penalties, but it's less of a moot point.
Google officially says there's no duplicate content penalty, and they've reiterated that there isn't a penalty for internally dupe content ... within a site. They filter dupes, and try not to show more than one copy of a document in the search results. So if they can see the rss on your home page, and somebody searches for something they cached from your rss, there's a good chance they'd return your home page in their serps instead of the forum post the info came from. And that's only if a lot of factors come together.
As for trying to come up for 'betting forum' ... if that's not in the title for whatever page ( home? ) you want to rank for, it should be. You're right that people will be more likely to link to you with specific anchor text if that's what you call your site, or a page within it. The title is also the most heavily weighted element on a page, more than a lot of links will be worth. That's the #1 thing any seo 'campaign' will do to rank for a particular phrase. To the point that you can see you're competing against 135,000 pages by searching for ones with betting forum in the title.
Finally, somebody left a comment on Matt Cutts' blog about how he had run a contest requiring his users to link back to him with specific anchor text ... right before he found himself punished by Google. Cutts confirmed it was true, and got the site reinstated after it took the contest down. The site was probably doing other things to get on the radar in the first place, but I'd still think twice.
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