Wanna Bet?

Been thinking about various kinds of gambling today.

Baseball season finally begins in earnest today with seven regular season games. I’m probably going to risk my tiny roll over on DraftDay betting on some of the daily fantasy games they have set up over there.

The first round of the Masters is underway today, too, of course, another sporting event on which many like to gamble. I was laughing yesterday at Jon Aguiar tweeting about the line for no one getting a hole-in-one for the entire tournament.

“Want a good Masters sweat?” Aguiar tweeted. “Bet way more than you can afford to lose on NO hole in one.” I think he did ultimately put some money on that one.

Then there’s that iSeriesLIVE thing happening in Ireland, that ten-person, €10,000 buy-in sit-n-go streaming live on the iSeriesLIVE site. Non-Americans can get accounts on Paddy Power and make all sorts of bets on whether players will win, where they’ll finish, and more, including various “in-game wagers” along the way, too. That begins in just a few minutes, I believe, at 17:00 GMT.

My buddies Dr. Pauly and F-Train have been writing about this iSeriesLIVE Kick-Off event over the last couple of days for the iSeriesLIVE blog, if you’re curious to learn more about how it all works. And if you click around over there you can watch the live stream, too.

As Pauly says in one of his posts, “betting on poker is not an exact science.” He goes on to explain how betting on something like how players might fare in a poker tournament is a lot different from other kinds of sports betting.

With baseball or golf or pretty much any other sport you can examine rosters, look at match-ups, study previous games or matches, and get some idea what might happen before placing a bet. It’s not an exact science, but you can educate yourself in such a way that you might well find reasonable spots or even edges to pursue. But the chance element in poker is such that it is hard to relate any knowledge you might gather beforehand to what might happen next.

Pauly points out as much in his post, noting how you can try to do some homework but still will have to “hope that your player doesn’t run into a bad beat.” After all, no matter how good or bad the players are, your guy can always run kings into another’s aces.

So even though I can’t bet on the iSeriesLIVE event I’m not really missing it too much. Am sure it’ll prove fun for some. And profitable, too, for the lucky ones. Personally though, even though I’m hardly the greatest player, I’m always going to feel a lot better about my edge playing poker myself as opposed to betting on others playing it.

(EDIT [added 3:00 p.m.]: Speaking of running kings into aces, was watching the live stream just now and such a situation arose. Faraz Jaka, then the chip leader, ran K-K into James Dempsey’s A-A. Dempsey’s aces held up, putting him into the chip lead and instantly changing his odds to win from 12/1 to 3/1.)