Why Arsene Wenger would be a Poker Master

Arsene Wenger has been playing the waiting game and is now slowly starting to win big

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 has shown in recent seasons he is willing to go all in on players like Mesut Özil and Alexis Sanchez – gambles which paid off with consecutive FA Cup 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 Santi Cazorla, Hector Bellerin, Gabriel, Olivier Giroud and the long, long hand in Francis Coquelin.

You’ll see many different approaches to winning at various games 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 Arsenal. The Gunners 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.

Wenger successfully signed Petr Cech from arch rivals Chelsea

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. Hesitancy 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 because they have 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 Thibaut Courtois.

Three or four of those and before you know it you’re within three 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?