Why are poker players so feted?

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Euler
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Betfair just signed up this poker player: -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... hOdONuAVBs

Which begs the question of why successful Poker players are treated like Pop stars, but successful sports traders, who can do just as well and use just as must skill, are given the cold shoulder?!?!
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to75ne
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i think its 2 main reasons. poker is probably a bigger market world wide. every other american film/tv series often seem to have poker games in them. these are usually played by the hero's/anti hero's. its portrayed as a very masculine thing to do. successful, big men, with big cars, blonde birds with big tits hang off their arms, they are wonderful bar room brawlers, shoot guns etc. the game as a very macho image.

trading on the other hand, is not generally widely known, hence a smaller number of participants. no tv series or films show macho men sitting pressing buttons, starring at comp screens for several hours. also those that do know of trading, generally consider us to be parasites/scum bags etc.

bit hard to compete really. perception would seem to be everything.

having watched you video link, he seems very dull, hardly fits the image i describe above. id sooner cut my toe nails then have er drink with him. yawn :)
hgodden
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Stuff em. I'd much rather be a sports trader ; poker players can play the game of their lives and still be well down at the end of the day.

Sports traders are the real modern day cowboys ;) No tax, work the days you want, from anywhere in the world. I hate to use the phrase but it's a no brainer
Groovyelms
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Crist he is a laff a minute, fun loving, fast talking, lip smacking, cool dressing, Dreary Dreary guy, obviously cheap, didn"t he play Lurch in "The Adams familly" :?:

Groovy
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superfrank
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'you feeling a bit unappreciated Euler?!

seriously though the poker players i've seen on tv are largely a bunch of objectionable weirdos, apart from Liv Boeree who is pretty hot...

Image
Image

there are plenty of feted stars in financial trading/investing, e.g. Larry Williams, Buffet, and championships for elite traders...
Williams won the 1987 World Cup Championship of Futures Trading from the Robbins Trading Company, where he turned $10,000 to over $1,100,000 (11,376%) in a 12 month competition with real money. Ten Years later his actress daughter Michelle won the same contest.
Iron
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Another consideration is that there is a widespread misconception that traders, like bankers, created the current finacial mess, lining their own pockets at the expense of the global economy.

Subtleties like the fact that only a small proportion of bankers traded toxic derivatives, and that government overspending contributed to the financial crisis, are often overlooked...

Jeff
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to75ne
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i cant see how anyone can see sports trading in the same light as financial trading jeff.

sports traders usually use their own money, not someone else's (or their own and someone else's money).

sports trading is relatively unknown or little heard of by most people. and as far as i am aware, no sports trader be he/she trading a football match, horse race, snooker match etc as ever brought a financial institution to its knees, or helped to screw up the western worlds economy and heaped misery upon millions of people.

could say the same for poker players, but not financial traders. being a big part of the financial sector rightly or wrongly they have got the image that, that sector as a whole as earnt for itself.
Iron
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Someone with intellectual curiosity might enquire as to the difference between a sports trader and a financial trader. But IMHO, many people will hear the word 'trader', and the mental shutters will come down...

Jeff
to75ne wrote:i cant see how anyone can see sports trading in the same light as financial trading jeff.
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to75ne
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[quote="Ferru123"]Someone with intellectual curiosity might enquire as to the difference between a sports trader and a financial trader. But IMHO, many people will hear the word 'trader', and the mental shutters will come down...

Jeff
excellent, reckon your bang on with that. as i said earlier perception would seem to be everything.
74.5
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Ferru123 wrote:Subtleties like the fact that only a small proportion of bankers traded toxic derivatives, and that government overspending contributed to the financial crisis, are often overlooked...Jeff
There didn't have to be that many bankers involved in trading toxic derivatives for the world's finances to be brought to its knees, given the content of this article: http://www.propublica.org/article/who-w ... aling-cdos .

Further,most of the investment arms of the world's banks bought and sold the toxic derivatives in an attempt to make a profit.They only hold them now because they weren't able to unload them prior to the crash.

The brown stuff caused by over spending Governments was always going to hit the fan one day.It was only a matter of time.The greedy bankers/traders just made it more acute and brought the problem forward due to the ensuing credit crunch.
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LeTiss
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Well for starters BF are just using this as exposure. This will help increase the profile of their own Poker section, which is possibly faltering

Also, Poker has a TV audience, and it often makes for compelling viewing. Traders just sit in front of screens manipulating figures.

Perhaps someone should run a TV show, where professional traders sit around a table with their own screen. All of them start with £1000 and the winner is the one with most money after a 2 hour period of trading. Ultimately, the guys in the TV gantry could run a commentary as traders pinch money or prices from each other.

Until that happens, I think trading will be deemed geekish, lonely and a bit underhand
74.5
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to75ne wrote:
Ferru123 wrote:Someone with intellectual curiosity might enquire as to the difference between a sports trader and a financial trader. But IMHO, many people will hear the word 'trader', and the mental shutters will come down...

Jeff
excellent, reckon your bang on with that. as i said earlier perception would seem to be everything.
As far as I can determine and IMHO,the financial woes of the world weren't caused by financial traders.They just did they were told and traded.It was the fault of the greedy bast**d bankers that created the toxic financial instruments in the first place.They must have had the intelligence to understand that they were toxic,surely?If so,why create them in the first place?If they didn't have the intelligence,why the hell were they working in banking?

A more important question is: having created these toxic financial instruments,why were people falling over themselves to buy them?Didn't they realise that they were toxic?What were they doing with their brains at the time?

Another important question:At the time that these toxic financial instruments were being created the likes of Gordon Brown and Alan Greenspan (Head of the US Federal Reserve) were running things.Why didn't they regulate them?They had the powers.Where the hell were they and what the hell were they doing?

It beggars belief that Gordon Brown thought that he was a fit person to run the IMF.Who's was he kidding?No more BOOM AND BUST?The idiot presided over the biggest boom and bust in the history of the world.It was his so called 'light touch' on the City of London that contributed to all this.Idiot.
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to75ne
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74.5
i agree that financial traders had little to do with the mess the world finds itself in. in that they just buy and sell on behalf off others, they don't create the "products/assets/instruments they trade", they trade what is there to be traded. but they are a very important part of the financial sector, and hence tarred with the same brush. i did hint at this in an earlier post.
to75ne wrote: could say the same for poker players, but not financial traders. being a big part of the financial sector rightly or wrongly they have got the image that, that sector as a whole as earnt for itself.
I too believe it was created by greedy bankers, whether or not they had the intelligence to understand they were toxic or likely to become toxic is in my opinion irrelevant. They knew that no matter what they will always come out on top, they have no morals or scruples. Their sole purpose is the desire for more power and wealth. Greed for the sake of greed.

As for politicians at best they are short sighted and dumb, at worst short sighted, dumb, and in the pockets either directly or indirectly or other interests. It would be very alluring to people like bush, brown, blair. To have been convinced that the clever greedy people have created a way of making perpetual profits, no more boom and bust, forever a tap of flowing cash to pay for their wars, social policies etc. if its impossible for the tax stream that the city was producing to dry up, it would probably get bigger as the city made profit, then as some point in the future we will be able to sort out our national deficits.

I doubt if many financial traders believed boom and bust was done forever.
Iron
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I'm not sure derivatives were the cause of the financial crisis at all. My understanding is that the toxic debt derivatives were basically insurance policies. If those insurance policies hadn't been taken out, someone would still have had to pick up the tab when mortgages lent to people with little income weren't repaid, and the housing market had fallen to the extent that the banks were guaranteed a haircut when they foreclosed.

It's easy for people to point the finger of blame at the banks, but it takes too to tango, and people who bought houses they couldn't afford (possibly lying on their mortgage application form) are also to blame...

IMHO, what happened was a classic bubble - when people felt that economy was on a sustained upward trajectory, much of the public and the government both went crazy with their spending, aided and abetted by the banks, under the assumption that the boom would last forever...

Jeff
74.5
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Ferru123 wrote:I'm not sure derivatives were the cause of the financial crisis at all. My understanding is that the toxic debt derivatives were basically insurance policies. If those insurance policies hadn't been taken out, someone would still have had to pick up the tab when mortgages lent to people with little income weren't repaid, and the housing market had fallen to the extent that the banks were guaranteed a haircut when they foreclosed.Jeff
Ignoring the Sovereign debt issue caused by over-spending Governments,there were two types of toxic financial instruments: CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations) & CDSs (Credit Default Swaps).Each CDO contains hundred and sometimes thousands of mortgages,a proportion of which are sub-prime.Some even contain other collateralized assets.A CDO could cost millions or even billions of dollars.To finance their purchase,individuals/companies borrowed short-term money(3months).At the end of the 3-month period,the loan was simply extended through a revolving RCN(Revolving Credit Note).The cost of borrowing short-term money is cheap compared with the interest expected from the CDO.This difference in interest rates creates profit for the CDO purchaser provided people keep up their mortgage payments.When the credit crunch hit,CDO purchasers found it difficult to renew their RCNs.

CDSs are derivatives.They are 'insurance policies'. They have been around for decades.In the early part of this millennium,they were small beer in that the value in circulation was low - so low in fact that they were totally unregulated.A CDS transfers the credit exposure of a CDO between parties.The buyer of a CDS receives credit protection in the event of a CDO failure from the seller of the CDS. By doing this, the risk of default is transferred from the CDO holder to the CDS seller. With the explosion in CDOs,the number and value of CDSs also exploded and caught the financial regulation authorities off-guard.Because of the volume explosion in CDSs they became tradeable.Because CDSs were unregulated,they weren't traded on an exchange and therefore transparency became a major issue.This meant that the seller of a CDS didn't necessarily need to have the funds to pay out on a claim in the even of a CDO failure in order to sell a CDS.This mean't that a CDO owner may not necessarily be insured in the event of his CDO failure even though he'd purchased a CDS.

This,however, wasn't the major issue caused by CDSs. The cost of a CDS is only a small proportion of that of a CDO(4%).This meant that the value of toxic loans in circulation was magnified by a factor of 25.Such was the explosion in CDSs that in 2008 one small office of a USA financial services company,based in Mayfair,issued CDSs to the value of 67% of the world's total GDP.

CDSs weren't the cause of the credit crunch but sure as hell it made the problem 25 times worse.
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