The Business of Poker

Author: Simon Dexter

A TV advert for online poker which suggests that the only difference between businessmen and poker players is the table they sit around has provoked a tongue-in-cheek response from the business writer over at canada.com.

The article compares the two very different types of people “…..gamblers play with their own money, take monumental risks, and when they don’t pan out, go broke. CEOs play with your money, take monumental risks, and when they don’t pan out walk away with multimillion-dollar severance packages, while you go broke.”

The writer goes on to suggest poker players are more like investors. Poker players, he contends “base their decision-making i.e. betting behaviour on mathematical odds, patterns of behaviour exhibited by their opponents, and visual clues, or “tells,” that give information as to the strength of their opponents’ hands. It’s a closed system, in that there are a finite number of players at the table, a finite amount of money available to be won or lost, and a finite number of variables that have to be taken into consideration when placing bets.”

So far so good - even I understood it. The next bit is a little more complicated but stick with -you might even learn something about business!

“The investing universe, on the other hand, is an open system: The number of players is mutable (i.e., companies enter and exit industries at will, altering the competitive mix and “odds”); the size of the pot is mutable (money is added or subtracted from the table - bear and bull markets - and also flows from industry to industry, from equities to commodities to currency); and the number of variables to consider is virtually unlimited.”

Heavy stuff but true nonetheless - especially the bit about the businessmen getting huge payoffs despite taking a company down. I lost my job once when a PLC went down the drain - mainly though bad management decisions. The bosses all got huge severance pay while ‘the workers’ received a pittance. (I’m not bitter btw).

Is their a moral to this tale? Well, not really. Perhaps understanding that poker should be treated like a business - although, unless you are a CEO then make sure it’s a successful one.

Tags: Online Poker, poker, Poker tells

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 3:59 pm and is filed under General Poker, News & Promotions Blog.