My Last Bet on Football

Watching English football in the late '70s was a dubious pleasure. My earliest memories involved sitting on an exposed concrete terrace, eating a Wagon Wheel chocolate bar, and watching as rival fans threw rocks at each other. Somewhere in the background there was a game going on, although it was rarely any good.



Football has since been transformed into a popular and well-marketed pastime, but many fans continue to hark back to the bad old days of hooliganism and empty stadiums, because they feel uncomfortable with the extraordinary makeover the game has enjoyed over the last few years. The game has been commercialized and upgraded, upsetting the old order of things.



Take my team, Chelsea. The mere mention of its name nowadays provokes anger, resentment, and prolonged lectures explaining how the club now represents everything that is wrong with the modern game. Chelsea, you see, has committed an unpardonable sin. After decades of indifferent football, it's now become rather good. In fact, it simply cannot lose. It won the title last season for the first time in 50 years, and is so far ahead this season that Paddy Power announced it would pay off all bets on Chelsea to win the title, with 31 league games still remaining. To make matters worse, Chelsea has achieved this success thanks to the lavish excesses of billionaire owner Roman Abramovic, whose attitude toward team building is, "Whatever it takes, and damn the cost."



This success is perplexing, because Chelsea appears to have broken its own sacred covenant of failure. It was put on this earth to be a roller-coaster club, the most reliable of unreliables, a team doomed forevermore to enjoy flashes of success followed by long periods of abysmal failure. An old family friend used to taunt me on match days with his favorite joke: "Chelsea are magic! Watch them disappear from the First Division!" How he laughed (and how I hated him), but that was Chelsea, a joke club.



My passion probably peaked around 1994, when Chelsea was on its way to its customary 14th position in the league. Such was my blind loyalty that, when the team faced an away fixture to Manchester United, I decided to visit a well-known high-street bookmaker and place my first-ever bet on a football game: £1 on Chelsea to win at 15-1. Even in a two-horse race, that was fair odds, given that Manchester United would end the season as champions, 41 points ahead of Chelsea.



In front of 55,000 stunned United fans, Chelsea won 1-0 – a miracle. Clearly, I had the magic touch, and I was bursting pride as I marched down to the bookies to pick up my winnings. But hang on, not so fast. As the man at the counter patiently and patronizingly explained, bookies in the United Kingdom were not allowed to accept bets on individual games because it was against the rules, and the bet should never have been made. "Ever so sorry, son, but as a gesture of our goodwill, here is your £1 back. No hard feelings."



How naïve of me to think they would pay out a bet they had accepted in good faith. Clearly, they were working to rules beyond my comprehension, a kind of insiders code of behavior that was obvious to everybody except the novice punter. That is why my first bet on football was also my last bet on football.



Punters are delicate things, and poker sites, like bookies, should treat them with appropriate care. Poker has had its own extraordinary makeover in the last few years, which is why online cardrooms need to find a compromise between handling the millions of players who sign up to play and the customer care required for each player to feel like an individual. Guidance and assistance must be liberally applied before the necessary bond of trust develops.



Even relatively minor things can turn people off: failure to cash out quickly, not replying to an e-mail, being insulted by another player – all factors that cannot be overlooked. Otherwise, those poker players of the future are liable to take one bite, and then walk away.



I sometimes worry that these dashing young Scandinavians I see at EPT events concentrate so hard on their lucrative poker careers that they do not leave enough time for the important things in life, such as drinking beer and chasing girls. So, when I saw the charming Norwegian Sverre Sundbo stumbling into the Victoria Casino on the last day of the London EPT event with a severe limp, I was relieved to hear his explanation: "I pulled a muscle on the dance floor last night," he said. "But she was worth it!"



Those aiming to attend the EPT Copenhagen event should make a note of the new dates, which are different from those originally published. The three-day tournament will take place Jan. 20-22 at the Casino Copenhagen. See http://www.ept.com/ for further details.

Conrad Brunner works for PokerStars.com.