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Hilarious Voter Odds For World Series Of Poker
By Tim Gross - Internet Business Blog |
The 2009 World Series Of Poker final table is playing this Saturday (broadcast on TV on Tuesday).
On the WSOP website, it lists the final 9 players (out of many thousands of players who started the event), and encouraged website visitors to vote on who they think will win the tournament.
Here are a few of the final players, their chip stacks, and the poll % results:
D. Moon 58,930,000 chips (chipleader) 6.57% to win
Cuts down trees for a living, never been to Vegas, admits he’s gotten lucky cards, but has also played carefully.
S. Begleiter 29,885,000 chips 1.10% to win
Amateur, retired Bear Sterns executive. Not a popular place to have worked right now after the bailout. Gee, ya think that has something to do with the votes he’s gotten?
J. Shulman 19,580,000 chips 5.62% to win
Professional poker player, editor of Card Player magazine, has been at a WSOP final table before.
P. Ivey 9,765,000 chips 78.05% to win
Considered by many to be the world’s best living poker player
What does this have to do with a marketing blog?
Being an entrepreneur and small business owner is all about taking calculated risks. And in order to take calculated risks, you need to be very realistic about understanding odds and probability.
The truth is, the chip leader Darvin moon has six times as many chips as Phil Ivey, Phil Ivey is one of the three shortest stacks coming into the final table.
If Phil and Darvin were to play heads-up poker for 100 hours, I would bet a huge amount of money that fill would be the overwhelming winner. But that’s not the situation here. Darvin has six times as much money, and the entire final table could last as little as a few hours.
With that scenario, the luck of the cards plays a huge role,and the idea that the chip leader only has a 7% chance of winning is simply not correct.
Even worse is the one percent odds given to Begleiter, who is number three in chip stack size. Obviously, people don’t want him to win (based on their votes, although the votes are supposed to be who they THINK will win, not who they WANT to win), because the public is down on Bear Stearns. But if anyone wants to bet me my dollar against their hundred dollars that Begleiter will win, I’ll be happy to take that bet.
I listed Shulman also, he is a very experienced pro with twice as many chips as Phil Ivey. Voters gave him a 5.62% chance to win versus Ivey’s 78.05%. Again, if anyone wants to bet my dollar bet against their $15 that Shulman will win over Ivey, I’ll take that bet all day long as well.
Takeaway Points:
as an entrepreneur, don’t let your personal preferences get in the way of the business decisions that you have to make every day. There are so many stories of people with products they’ve created and fallen in love that they keep wasting time, effort, and money to try to promote when the market has already shown that they don’t want it.
One of the most important keys to succeeding is trying to mold your beliefs to face reality, not trying to get reality to mold to your beliefs.
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