Sport

Next practice not best practice

‘Best Practice’ is one of those buzzwords that gets chucked around corporations with impunity. I get where it’s come from and I get why many like to rely on it – I mean, once you have found a way to do something successfully, why would you not want to replicate that experience over and over again?

Here’s why. The speed of change in human behaviour brought about by the speed of change in technology means that by the time something becomes enshrined as best practice, it is already likely to have been superseded. That’s because for the first time since the written word arrived, we are no longer masters of the message or the medium.

dinosleep2Best practice should no longer be seen as a blueprint for describing the standard way of doing things in an organisation. It’s too safe. It’s too comfortable. And it’s too predictable. I see evidence all over the place, especially in advertising, marketing and PR. If you’re going to cite best practice as your primary justification for doing things in a certain way, you may as well stick a sign above your desk while you’re at it saying “Quiet please, dinosaur sleeping”.

We need to think differently; with agility, fluidity, creativity and a bit more bravery. Best practise has served us well for decades, nay centuries – because we have been able to control the messages and the medium. We are losing this power with every day that passes. Carrier pigeons, telegrams, snail mail, faxes, email – same difference really – all had similar limitations when it came to reach, speed and spread. Social Media has democratised communication like never before and it’s turned us all into authors and broadcasters.

It’s time to forget about best practise. The pace of change is such that predicting ‘next practice’ is what will bring the bacon home.

Bad luck?

Is poker gambling or not? It’s a debate that has been raging ever since the Americans passed the UIGEA (Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act) in 2006, forcing some of the biggest operators in the online Poker industry to stop accepting players from the US, including PartyGaming,  SportingBet, 888 and bwin.

As public companies their appetite for risk was clearly tempered by their long-term fiduciary duty to their shareholders and I guess they had no choice but to withdraw from the American market despite the catastrophic short-term effect on their share prices.

Here’s what I think. Lumping poker into the scope of the UIGEA is harsh because I don’t consider poker to be a form of gambling. Bingo is proper gambling. Scratch cards and lottery tickets are proper gambling. Slot machines, roulette and other casino games – proper gambling. It doesn’t matter how experienced you are, chance is the only determinant.

The Oxford English Dictionary simply defines ‘gambling’ as “playing games of chance for money”.

To the uninitiated it’s easy to see why you may think poker is a game of chance. The best cards will always win and you cannot control which cards you are dealt right?

Wrong. OK, it’s true that the best cards at the end of any given round will always win. However, in online poker over 75% of hands don’t end in a showdown, so the cards you are dealt are largely irrelevant, because over 75% of the time no-one gets to see them.

What counts in poker is not what cards the dealer gives you, but what you do with them. The quality of the decisions you make based on your table position, the size of your chip stack, the betting behaviour of those around you, your ability to read ‘tells’ accurately, your understanding and application of pot odds – all will play a much more important role in your success than the cards you are dealt.

There is a massive market for poker books, periodicals and instructional websites. None focus on luck as being an important component in your poker game play. And come to think of it, I don’t recall seeing a huge selection of bingo or lottery winning strategy books in my local library.

As a keen amateur player myself, I find luck does creep in, but more bad luck than good luck. If you play the game well every time you go into a showdown you should hold the strongest hand. If you then get beaten, that is bad luck. However, mathematically you have played correctly and in the long term you will win more than you lose in that situation. If you go into a showdown with the weakest hand and you win, you have played badly and got lucky – and mathematically in the long term you will lose more than you win in that situation.

Respected journalist, author and poker ninja Victoria Coren knows her stuff. In her excellent For Richer For Poorer: A love affair with Poker she dismisses Roulette as a mug’s game: “Thank God, my old roulette habit has been channelled into poker, which offers the same adrenaline but can, slowly and gradually if I study the game, be controlled by skill and judgement”.

Charles Nesson, a Harvard law professor and founder of The Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society, takes a similar albeit less instinctive view. Nesson sees in poker “a language for thinking about and an environment for experiencing the dynamics of strategy in dispute resolution”.

Garry Kasparov, a chess grandmaster, argues that poker offers lessons on chance and risk management that even his own beloved game can’t. Many chess professionals are moving into poker, not least because the money is better.

I don’t think many right minded person would consider chess to be a game of chance.

Earlier this year a Dutch Court ruled that poker is a game of skill not chance and there is an interesting case currently being deliberated on by the South Carolina Supreme Court, the outcome of which will be interesting.

Above all, there is one very simple, glaringly obvious fact that proves beyond all reasonable doubt in my simple mind that poker has to be a game of skill.

Just take a look at the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Hall of Fame. The top three players, who have all won more than 10 WSOP bracelets over careers spanning 20 years, have accumulated poker winnings in excess of $13m having cashed on over 150 occasions.

Nobody can possibly get lucky that many times! It’s as ridiculous as claiming that golf is a game of chance and Tiger Woods just got lucky.

What I cannot quite get my head around is why anyone, most of all the law makers of the world’s greatest superpower would consider poker to be a game of chance?

Have they never played the game?

Space invaders

We have been hijacking everyone’s Windows lock screen at work on and off for a while now. It gives us a nice instant attention grabbing opportunity to remind people of something that is going on, for example a product launch, or as in today’s instance, a donor drive for the Anthony Nolan Trust. It’s non-intrusive in that it only appears when you unlock your screen after periods of inactivity or being away from your desk, and provided you don’t overdo it, it is a nice highly visual trigger to supplement other more conventional communications channels.

And then we went one step too far. The Marketing Team decided to create a series of branded images celebrating our commercial arrangements with Manchester United and Barcelona, for whom we are the official betting partner. Within hours people were complaining about having their ‘personal space’ invaded by an image of the Red Devils. They have a point. We have a very diverse workforce; however the one thing you can say about most of our staff is that they love their sport.

OK, so we can all be proud of our official betting partner status with arguably the two biggest club sides in the world. But if you support Liverpool, Chelsea, or Manchester City do you really want to see Manchester United players staring out of your screen at you every day?

With emotions running high I took the opportunity to throw up an instant poll on our intranet and a few days later the results made very interesting reading.

“The screensaver on my work computer belongs to the company – they can put anything they like on there.”

Admittedly the Wayne Rooney reference was a bit of a gag given all of the nonsense in the tabloid press recently, but I must confess that I expected a slightly higher percentage of staff to agree with the seemingly blindingly obvious statement that the company can do what they want with everyone’s desktop given that it belongs to them.

After a couple of hundred votes, representing well over 10% of the company, nearly a third of respondents made a clear statement that the screen on their work computer belongs to them and thereby implying that we have no right to intrude upon it.

So either I try to look for ways to change this mindset, which I must confess is rather tempting, or I simply accept this as a genuine sentiment and try to make sure that future images are slightly more palatable to what clearly has the potential to be a a highly partisan crowd.

What would you do?

Emotional hedging

I have been a loyal Fulham supporter, man and boy, for the last 35 years. Nothing hits my emotional sweet spot more than being there when Fulham win. Watching them beat the blue filth 1-0 at Craven Cottage in March 2006, for the first time in 26 years was without doubt the most emotional experience of my life.

Quick clarification needed just in case her-indoors reads this one day: by emotional I mean the rip-roaring, adrenalin filled, mind blowing, excitement kind of emotion, not the beautiful, warm, dewy-eyed kind of emotion that has punctuated our marriage, especially when the girls were born. Love ya sweetie!

So when I tell people that I quite often bet against my beloved Fulham, they don’t get it. Many footy die-hards can’t get their heads around it and think I’m being totally disloyal. I don’t get this. Emotional hedging rocks, and here’s why.

If Fulham lose I am generally inconsolable for hours, maybe days. However, I have a nice chunk of cash in my Betfair account to soften the blow. If Fulham win, I treat the loss as my contribution to their victory. I kid you not! The amount I stake is always based on how much am I prepared to pay to see Fulham win the match. It is never based on how much I need to win to make me feel better – I could never afford to take that kind of risk!

The key to emotional hedging is to always bet with the head and not with the heart. Backing your team through blind faith and devotion is a mugs game. Look at the evidence and leave emotion out of the decision. This allows me to back Fulham to win – and it allows me to back them to lose (called a lay bet). If I’m at the match and I can feel the momentum going our way, I sometimes trade out of my original bet (thank God for Betfair Mobile!). Other times, if my head says Fulham will win before the match I’ll happily back them and let the bet ride if I’m not at the game.

Example – earlier this evening, Fulham played Wolfsburg away in the quarter finals of the Europa League. Betfair punters had Wolfsburg as clear favourites to win the match despite Fulham going into the game with a 2-1 advantage from the home leg. I use betfair punters as my benchmark as we all know that Betfair odds are better value and much more accurate than the bookies, right? I took a view that they were probably correct and my head was saying betting against Fulham to win the match was the correct bet. I decided my contribution to a Fulham victory would be £70.

At no stage during the match did I ever even consider anything other than a Fulham victory. We won, I’m off to Hamburg, I lost £70 and I am happy as Larry. If we’d lost, I’d have been miserable as sin, I wouldn’t be off to Hamburg and I’d have £90 sitting in my Betfair account. If I’m going to be miserable I’d rather be miserable with some extra wedge in my pocket.

£70 may seem a bit extreme to some people, but the truth is my emotional hedging strategy more than pays for my season ticket every year. Happy days!

Get a grip!

I don’t get it. Why would an intelligent adult go to the time, effort and cost of turning out at Wembley to watch their country play in an international friendly football match and feel compelled to boo John Terry before he has even kicked a ball?

The figures suggest that that 45% of women and 55% of men have been guilty of committing adultery. Given that these are the ones who have admitted to it or have been caught, I’d guess that the real numbers must be even higher.

I’ve had a belly full of ‘holier than thou’ phone-in show callers and journalists banging on about how John Terry has let down his club and country.

Only one person on this earth really knows the extent to which his behaviour is worthy of reproach. Who are we to boo the man when we have no knowledge whatsoever of what really went on. I don’t dispute that he had an affair with a single woman whilst married.

But hang on a minute. So did Bill Clinton. So did Prince Charles. So did John Prescott. And Hugh Grant, Tiger Woods, Jude Law, Gordon Ramsey, Chris Tarrant, and Brad Pitt. Not to mention Sven Goran Eriksson (OK he was not married), Gary Lineker, Ashley Cole and of course David Beckham, who incidentally attracted nothing but cheers as he ran the line warming up last night.

I think you get my drift. 

I’m not condoning adultery. But is it really something that should force England’s captain marvel to step down? 

Get a grip people!

New Brand Tribalism

I am a sucker for a good brand and follow many. Given the affinity I feel with many, what I find irrational is that despite a strong bond with a brand, it only takes one small act of poor customer service and the love affair is all over.

All except one. What is it about football clubs? They make so little effort to create and maintain a community – because they don’t need to. I have suffered brutally poor customer service over the last 34 years from Fulham FC but do my feelings diminish? Never!

For me it illustrates the absolute strength of authentic long term emotionally based relationships. Emotions are far more powerful for some of us than reason and logic, and the emotional commitment a football fan has generally creates a virtually unbreakable bond that most commercial brands would die for.

I’m going to return to this when I’ve had a bit more time to think about it. I’m thinking New Brand Tribalism…..

Until then; COME ON YOU WHITES!