Teddy Sheringham is one of the most successful soccer players of the last half a century. His professional career lasted twenty-four years, making him one of the game’s survivors. His quality as a player earned him an MBE, presented to him by Prince Charles for services to soccer on the 20th of November 2007.

He is also father to Charlie Sheringham, who has had a successful league and non-league career, and now plays for AFC Wimbledon as a striker. Teddy too played mainly as a second striker, first for Millwall between 1983 and 1991, before moving on to Tottenham Hotspur and then Manchester United – it was whilst playing for MU that he was named PFA Player of the Year in 20001.

He retired in 2007/08, at the age of 4, spending his time improving his poker game. He is now a frequent on the world poker scene, and has racked up over $300,000 in live tournament winnings, including two World Series of Poker (WSOP) cashes. He also has a final table finish at a leg of the European Poker Tour under his belt, which netted him a cool €93,000.

Two final table appearances in the Palm Beach Big Game and a final table finish at The Ritz Club mean that he is no rookie – he has been playing seriously for the last six years, but has been playing poker throughout his adult life.

He learned to play poker in dens, hotels and on coaches, and says that he really learned to play poker by losing money. He has a tendency, like a lot of new players, to go for big hands and pairs, to be flash and cool. Now he says “it’s more about trying to figure out what other people have got, using real skill, and whether they’re bluffing. You have to think ahead.”

Luckily, since bwin started up, you don’t need to lose money to learn to play poker well. For beginners, Texas hold’em is usually considered the best starting point, you can find all the details here: poker.bwin.be/nl/texas-holdem.

You can practice hands and enter freeroll tournaments with bwin without spending anything at all – and according to most pros out there, the new guys who learn online are the best players out there. Start with free tournaments, learn the ropes, and then build up to cash games with the free bwin poker school.

Semi-related to poker … was working on a post over at Soccerati (our baby brother site), about how an online gambling op (188Bet.com) has come in to buy up the jersey space on two English Premier League teams. It just seems kinda funny to me — considering that the NFL is so anti-online gambling, and the EPL is so pro. Soccer in general seems to have totally embraced the online gambling biz. Such a clear distinction between American football and European football.

In fact … check this out … you have very major teams across the pond (and a few minor ones) that have direct links and betting pages on their official sites. The Spurs, for example, are supposedly working with their sponsor Mansion to develop a Tottenham skin, and already host weekly freerolls for game tickets.

The people making money off Peyton Manning jerseys hate online poker; meanwhile the other kind of football teams proudly support it — or are being supported by it.

Now you know I’m not much of a boycotter — really, I generally think they’re stupid and ineffective — but it does occur to irk me how much “free advertising” poker players give NFL teams by wearing their jerseys. Considering that American football gives nothing back to poker, and in fact subtracts from it … maybe it might be time for poker players to hang up their lucky Tony Romo jerseys, ya know? Just sayin’ … all it takes is watching a little soccer to realize how wearing any NFL promotion at the WSOP wouldn’t be too different from wearing a Bill Frist or Jim Leach campaign button un-ironically.