I was talking to a couple of professional colleagues this week one of which worked as a sports trader and the other was a professional punter. By the way the pro punter who I will not name has a list of contacts second to none. I thought that I knew the time of day when it came to sports but this guy could leave me standing with his utter professionalism and resources. It also set me thinking on a huge scale when it came to my own level of professional activity within poker.
You see sports betting and trading will only ever be short term interests for me but poker is where my real passion is and this is where I need to concentrate. It is good to see the WSOP having several English winners and none more so than Barny Boatman of The Hendon Mob who picked up a cool $546k…….well done Barny and you certainly deserve a big title and a bracelet. The Hendon Mob have come a long way since their days on Late Night Poker and their affiliation with Full Tilt Poker which you can see if you click here and then Genting Poker.
When people continually place themselves into the firing line and put the tournament time in then you cannot object to them winning. I noticed a few US players making a few negative comments but that can be summed up in one word…….jealousy. Anyway I am straying off the point because the subject is ratings. Everywhere we go these days there are ratings from insurance companies to sports news desks. However as a keen chess player in the past and someone who was well aware of the ELO rating scale for chess players then I was surprised to see just how relevant this was for sports bettors.
I also became aware this week of how important this could be for the rating of poker players. I realised this week that there were gaping holes in my game selection strategies and that needs to be fixed before I return to playing poker. So I have stopped playing for a while until I get my new rating service perfected. Then I will spend an entire month starting Aug 1st and rate as many players as I can in my NL100 cash games.
This should allow me to restart playing poker seriously on Sept 1st with a new database of notes behind me. Without going into too many details, I should be able to increase my earn rate that should mean that I have more of an incentive to play poker than what I have been doing. In fact the hardest part is going to be building up my ratings because this is going to feel like unpaid work at the outset. It is amazing how sports bettors and traders can teach us poker players a thing or two when it comes to making money. I often think that skilled traders and sports bettors could play poker better than most poker players.
