Wenger Would Be A Poker Master

I sometimes wonder what Arsene Wenger would be if he wasn’t a world-class football manager and I’ve recently come to the conclusion he’d be the scourge of the poker scene. As an amateur card player and frequenter of physical and virtual casinos I’ve seen lots of different approaches to taking home the jackpot and Wenger seems to have experience in them all.

He’s shown in recent seasons he is willing to go all in on players like Özil and Alexis Sanchez – gambles which paid off with consecutive trophies. And he has also shown himself to be adept at playing the long, slow hand patiently picking up the cards he needs in the form of players like Cazorla, Bellerin, Gabriel, Giroud and the long long hand in Coquelin.

You’ll see many different approaches to winning at various games at netbet online casino but the one I felt most resembled Wenger of the past decade is the player with a mid-level amount of funds, playing it safe, keeping himself in every hand but not quite winning anything to then strike out and clean up the tables.

That was us. We hung in at the top end of the table for year on year and then out of nowhere a team so many had written off with just two major additions won back to back trophies.

Wenger’s capture of Petr Cech from Chelsea reminds me of another type of poker move I see a lot (and fail at trying) and that is the “empty win”. Someone wins a hand and takes a sizable but not outwardly significant amount of cash from a big hitting opponent. On the face of things it looks to have made little difference as the gap between them is still enormous but it often is the start of the turning of the tide.

The big hitting opponent is slightly stung and thus becomes wary of this opponent. Wariness soon turns to fear and it is with the fear of the opponent that the once big hitter tends to adapt his play and become hesitant. Hesitance exposes weaknesses and weaknesses can be exploited thus the young pretender soon finds himself going toe to toe with the big hitter who is now sweating buckets that they’ve been caught up with.

Cech may seem like an insignificant or empty victory as he wasn’t first choice at Chelsea but like that small cash win gave the challenger something extra to play with, an opportunity to be a little more attacking, take more risks, a player like Cech gives you extra security at the back allowing you to take more risks and possibly pick up wins where you barely deserved draws. Chelsea did it for years with Cech and they did it last season with Courtois.

Three or four of those and before you know it you’re withing 3 points of the league leaders and they start to sweat. Risks they would have taken before seem more dangerous than ever and they lose some ground to an irrelevant player but crucially give you the chance to get even closer, possibly overtake them.

Wenger hasn’t disappointed in the summer transfer windows of recent years and now he has a hand he can go all in on . It’s going to be a long hand, but who knows, maybe Wenger has been counting the cards?