During the online poker boom of the mid-2000s, I played full-time for a few years.
I'd be hesitant to describe myself as a "pro"; I was young and not playing particularly high stakes. But I was churning out hands (playing 24 tables at once) and making an hourly well ahead of what anyone would pay me at the time.
Anyway, I haven't played poker (online) for many years now, but a lot of the lessons I learned during those years have served me well when sports betting. Here are three of them:
Don't be results orientated
Poker is very much a game of ups and downs. It is common for good moves to backfire and bad moves to pay off. Accordingly, it was extremely important to separate your actions from results. For instance, if I managed to get an opponent to bet all their chips against me with a worse hand, only for them to hit one of the only two cards in the deck they needed to beat me, I needed to keep my head up and acknowledge I'd done the right thing, despite losing.
But equally, if the roles were reversed, I couldn't celebrate knowing I'd made a bad play.
When it comes to sports betting, it is much the same. If I call a tight game between strong defences, bet on a 0-0 draw, and then watch a tight game finish 1-0 due to a freak goal out of nowhere, I know to tell myself that if I keep doing what I'm doing, I'll come out top in the long-run.
Information is power... but only if your opponent doesn't have it too
People who play poker a lot tend to run programs which provide thousands of statistics on their opponents. This is fine, and the information is great for informing decisions. But it becomes worthless if the other players has the same information, and knows I have this information. If the stats show a crazily aggressive opponent, but that opponent knows I have this information, they can easily adapt their game to fool me.
With sports betting, it is easy to get carried away with information. "Messi is injured so it makes sense to bet against Barcelona". Well, no, because obviously the bookmaker knows this too, and has already adapted their odds accordingly.
There's no system, only constant improvement
I eventually fell out of love with poker and stopped studying the game. My results quickly went downhill. It is the same with sports betting. Finding an edge is hard, but possible. The thing is even if you find one, don't bank on keeping it very long. For a couple of years, I had a lot of success betting on football from very obscure leagues. I had an algorithm which was great at spotting games where bookmakers had not priced up correctly. But very quickly this edge vanished, as the bookmakers improved their own pricing strategies.
Would love to hear from anyone else who played poker seriously online and now bets on sports...
These are some golden behaviors rather then techniques. Although they not grantee that you will win but our overall experience of poker and gambling will be better if we follow them.
