[Blax0r]

Long post ahead; the first and last paragraphs are really all you need to read imo.

I'm a very small fish here at SBR, but I just want to give an overall thank you to everyone for the things I've learned so far while being entertained with ridiculous posts/videos/promotions.

A little about me: I'm a software engineer for the 3rd or 4th largest financial data provider in the world, and have been experiencing career dissatisfaction. I typically spend my time creating a windows applications that do things like fix text formatting or pull data in Excel (we work with the Excel API a lot). No real analysis of data; just taking static information and displaying it to the user. In addition, my general math skills started to deteriorate; a good portion of software developers are actually very poor at numerical reasoning (so don't let the nerd "arrogance" get to you).

As an EE major from semi-prestigious schools, I am far more passionate about engineering mathematics, which includes things like signal processing, probability math, and stats. In contrast, my work involved 0 math, and decisions were made through people's opinions rather than hard facts and stats (whoever screams the loudest gets it his/her way). However, Seeing the same type of math reappear for sports forecasting is seriously amazing; going home to work on my small tennis data scraper and model (I slightly modified a paper by some harvard prof) was, and will remain to be, a great escape.

In addition, playing the poker tourneys here gave invaluable practice for mental odds calculations; I actually don't play any poker on other sites (EVER) and sorta started at ground zero w/ poker in general. However, the odds math is almost identical to sports betting, and we can easily compute the pr(some hand combo), which directly calculates our EV for raising/folding/calling. The short timer, however, definitely stressed doing the fast and dirty math, which I got better at as I played in more tourneys.

So how did this help me land a job? Well, I applied for a position as a financial engineer at an investment company; thanks to practicing the odds math and computing probabilities of random events, I could pretty much nail any brainteaser they could throw at me (and spot their errors! one guy thought 6-1 payout on a dice roll was 0 EV lol). My future job will still involve coding, but we'll be working on pricing models for fixed income securities and investing time to learn how it actually works before putting it into code (ie, a real engineer's work). In addition, my future manager was genuinely interested in my "work-in-progress" amateur handicapping, and felt there is definitely some overlap in core skills. Simple things like interbook arbitrage had an equivalent in financial markets, and pricing a vanilla european option follows the same idea as handicapping a game.

So I hope you guys enjoyed reading my excessively long story, and I'm also curious if gambling skills have helped you in your career.

[MadTiger]

Happy for you.

Gambling reminds me to analyze and evaluate prospective choices to determine the highest value.