Staking

I have been doing a lot of staking recently, so I thought since it's more interesting than me talking about bubbling final tables or bitching about losing huge pots in cash games as a massive favorite I may as well write about it here.

There are two types of staking deal I engage in. The first is purely for fun, sometimes they make a little profit, sometimes they don't. I still seek to back + EV players but it's usually for small amounts, a typical deal will be someone playing 50,000 hands of $50 NL and me picking up 10% of a $1k seed fund and taking 60-80% of the profits on my share. I often rail these people, try to give them advice and just enjoy being a part of something they are trying to achieve. I have done a few smaller MTT ones too, backing people 100% for a set number of tournies and taking a cut of any profits.

The second type is more about making money. I have backed people for everything from $50 NL to 30/60 FL sometimes picking up all of their action. On the whole these deals have gone very, very well for me. One person I backed made me just over $4.5k in two separate deals (including makeup from the first) over just two months, and my biggest loss to date has been about $500 which I'm more than happy to write off given how well my other deals have gone.

Last week however I encountered my first real issue. I backed a player $2,000 to play $100 NL 6-max with a 20 buy-in BR over a set number of hands. This player was hugely +EV and after running badly at the start and dropping to $50 NL for a while, he eventually clawed it back and went on a nice run towards the end to finish up at $3800 total. We had a 70/30 split in my favour, so I was due to pick up a tidy $1200 profit and he was going to pick up $600 for his efforts.

Unfortunately after the deal had ended he supposedly decided he wouldn't want to play low stakes after being at $100 NL with his newly earned, but ultimately smaller $600 BR, so he proceeded to try to work up a bit more money using the money I staked him while he still had it.

The story is that he was taking shots and first lost the $600, then lost a bunch while tilting, eventually stopping at $2k. This was over a period of about 2 weeks while I didn't hear from him at all (before this we spoke 3-4 times a week, so initially I thought he had done a runner with the whole lot). I managed to get my $2k back which I was happy about after being frozen out and thinking I might end up with nothing, so at least I didn't actually lose anything on the deal.

Obviously I have no way of knowing if his story is true. He has no way to pay the money back, hence the original staking deal, and the only way he could raise more funds was to get another backer, which I would obviously move to block. So I think I have to write that money off, which is annoying, but I think it would be too much effort and stress to try to get it back when I consider my chances to be pretty low from the outset. Ironically I knew he wanted a larger BR, and if he didn't go silent for 2 weeks I was going to alter the deal slightly in his favour to give him a chance to build a half decent BR and start playing for himself.

All this leads to a few deals I have been arranging recently for the WSOP. I had a couple of stakes for people in prelims but I pretty much broke even on those with one early exit and one small cash. However, I have backed no fewer that 7 people for the WSOP Main Event this year, all on different deals. Some of them are buying straight up percentages, which isn't that good of a deal for the backer, but it's just a bit of gamboool with a potentially huge payouts.

So I'll be watching the ME with interest next week and hopefully one or two of my guys will go deep and make me some serious money...