blonde poker forum

Hi all

Someone i know not related to this forum has asked me if i am interested in bank rolling him so he can go pro. He wants to play cash and mtts. Mostly live not online.

My issue is not that of trusting the person it is that the figure that i think he needs to get started with and the figure he thinks he needs to get started are miles apart.

I am taking into account, day to day living expenses, travel cost and basically making sure that he can meet his rent and household bills for at least six months plus a sum for cash play and a sum for mtt.

To me taking this pressure out of the situation should let him concentrate on his game. After all this will be a new experience for him as he will be giving up his regular job.

My figure is 5 times higher than his and my view is that if he starts off with the minimum he is not necessarily giving him self the best shot. So i would rather decline.

Any thoughts 

PS: This is not a financial decision on my part it is a moral decision on whats best for him.

Cheers

The figure will undoubtedly be even larger than you have in mind too. A player will swing plenty, bit that doesn't mean you have to give them the full amount of potential swings up front, you can provide a sensible roll to cover at least as many sessions as they could play before you would be able to get more funds to them.
that aside, this is massively unlikely to be successful, but as money doesn't seem to be the driver, you may already be ok with that.

Can you give me a reason for saying >this is massively unlikely to be successful>

Honestly I could give you about 50 reasons. And I'm not trying to be facetious, I could write a book on different ways that this can go wrong. but I don't know the player, his skill level, his expenses, his intended schedule, so of course it could work. But very few players are able to make it pay grinding live events, if he hasn't already been successful at this as sole source of income, then they will be a big statistical dog to succeed. meanwhile if others chip in that it is likely to succeed, then I'll give examples of how and why it can go wrong. My expectation is that just about everyone would take the under here...

What makes you think he is a winning player?

Why can he not bankroll himself from his regular job?

I doubt his figure is based on anything too solid and I doubt that for someone who this is a new experience for should be taking on such a deal. The hours involved, emotional discipline needed and finding a plus ev schedule, especially for him who will be providing 100% of the time and be receiving less than a 100% of the money in a live environment which whilst having lower variance involves more costs and more pitfalls of being in a casino. This is a really bad idea. To play live tournaments for a living you honestly need to be playing with an average buyin of probably £1k or higher and even then it is heavily dependent on your overall expenses. I don't think it is worthwhile travelling to a GPS for over £80 worth of expenses and I'd imagine my roi is higher than the potential horse.  


Just buying x% of his action and not committing him to a deal with makeup seems to make much more sense for both parties.

Three stacks of high society, imo...

I thought I would chip in with some of my thoughts on this.  I have been playing around with the idea of going pro for a number of years, with the intention to play mainly live MTT with the option of cash games (normally a deep 1/2 game)if I bust out of the comp. I looked to set aside living costs af around 10-15k to cover household bills, food, clothes, Ect, and then looked to have a roll of around 10k. I would mainly be looking to play the daily comps at my local (to keep traveling costs to a min and the average players are soft) ranging form 30 quid to 70 quid and throw in the odd Dtd monthly and monthly special at the local would make up my schedule to begin with, and review accordingly In 6-12 months time. I would also take shots at the higher buy ins if I could sat into them or sell action.

Now most poker players are losing ones, and need there normal income to keep them a float. I find constancy  is the key to playing for a living, and you should only look to do it once you a earning more money playing in your spare  time than your 9-5, over a a good period of time. When it comes to having to borrow in order to start up, it would suggest that your not yet a winning enough money playing the game. On top of that you now need to make enough money to repay your backer, increase/maintain your bankroll and, set aside cash for your next household bills.

I've ranted on far too much than what I intended, but in sum it all up I'm an optimised, it can be done, but money with relisitic expectations and solid bankroll management. And to answer your question it probally is the higher figure that is required and your deffinatly thinking about the bigger picture about their finance. As long as your confident he is doing this for the right reasons and has the ability to achieve their goals then go for it.

In a side note how much would he like to make an hour on the cash games?

why would you have to play 1k buy ins to play for a living? It all depends on how much money you require to make a living rather than just trying to win a small to medium house.

GPS in Birmingham. £20 petrol, £20 food (seems low, 2x meal 1x brekkie) £50 hotel £90 in expenses. 50% roi on 440 = 220 so your ev is £130 over roughly 6 hours playing time for an hourly of £20 but when you include getting to and from the venue being free for all day one and day two etc your hourly is just a pittance and your variance is insane.

If your ABI is £50 and your roi is 100% you need an average playing time of ~5 hours to be worthwhile and no expenses at all which just isn't possible.

I was going to post some similar figures, I think pleno covered this in his diary maybe? Somewhere anyway.  The best players in the world ain't gonna have a long term roi of over 50% in mtts, and I think that's optimistic.  This makes the 1 day £50ers just impossible to play for a living. 

I understand what you are saying, and keeping expenses to a min to maximize your ROI. But it also depends on other factors, such as the time period/number of tournaments which you take into account. You cant just pluck a figure of 50% ROI as an average figure. An average prize pool for the an ABI of £50 will normally be around the 5K mark with about 1600 up top, you could potentially win 31 times your buy in for a much higher ROI of 50, and depending on your skill level finish in the top 3 positions about 1/5 of the time. A know a few people who achieve this type of return in local comps in such as Luton G casino.

Having an average hour rate of £20 quid playing 40 hours a week 48 weeks of the year, your making 800 quid a week, £41,600 a year tax free......   

20% of the time you think you will finish in the top 3 in a 100 runner 1 day live turbo donkfest?  Are you serious?  You talk of plucking figures out of the air where do you get this 20% figure from and the £20 average hourly rate (this was mentioned by the previous poster on a £440 buy in comp where said player has a 50% roi in these types of games)?  Have you factored in rake for these type of comps which will be 10% min more likely 15-20% on the buy in.  Expenses getting to and from the venue, travel time getting to and from the venue?  A weekly or twice weekly tip for the dealers as you plan to finish top 3 at least once a week?

I assume this is dependent on a minimal skill level of 'unbelievably amazing'?

I trying to think of something constructive to say in response..... If you cant final table 20% of the time (top 3 as stated above) then you shouldn't be considering being a MTT Pro. We are not talking about a "Fun"player" who will final table once in a blue moon.

And yes an Average hourly rate of £20 would indeed include expenses.

I'm confused by that - there is a whole lot of difference between "final table" & "top 3".

Final tabling in 100 runner comps 20% of the time (assuming 10 player Final) is achievable.

Top 3 20% of the time, over any reasonable sample size, is impossible, no matter how "soft" the fields may be considered.

Do you mean "20% of the times they final they will make top 3"? That would be 4 MTT's per 100 played. They would not cover the buy-ins for the 100 MTT's at that rate.

It's quite a struggle to think of more than a handful of players who could make a living at "Live" MTT's.

I would agree with you that "if you can't make top 3 20% of the time, you should not be considering earning a living as a (Live) MTT Pro" because I don't know of any player who could achieve that over a sensible sample size.

How is final tabling a 100 runner event finishing in the top 3? (you state £5k prizepools with abi of £50) so it's fair to assume there are 100 runners in these events.  I assume FT will have 10 players on it.  So you have gone from finishing in the top 3% of an mtt to the top 10% of an mtt 20% of the time.  Big difference.

Run me through the maths of where you get a £20 hourly rate AFTER expenses from playing £50 100 runner live mtts if you wouldn't mind?

Also the vast majority of your hourly rate over time in such top heavy mtt's (£1600 first prize from a £5k prize pool) will be converting final table finishes into wins.  Even if you make 20% of FT's that won't turn a profit if you keep folding to make the final table with no chance of actually winning.  Someone that is so concerned about making the FT so often is highly likely to be a loser long term in these type of mtt's imo.

I have changed the goal posts in regards to finishing top 3 to final table I'll give you that one. What would you say the normal percentage of time someone final table's and then go on to finish in the top 3? 33% based on 9 handed final table? so based of making the final table 20% of the time your going to make the top 3 6% of the time. I'll run the numbers later on today and see what it pops out as an hourly rate.

The £20 an hour was an example from the post I replied to. I simple put that figure in a 40 hour week..... It would all depend on how far you live from the venue ect ect.

Over a three year spell at Luton, 2008-2010 i finalled tabled 1 in 3 sub £100 comps i played in, all recorded and colour coded on the spreadsheet lol

was at best, and thats stretching it, a marginal winner because my style got me to 6th-9th a lot and rarely with a stack that got me top 3

all it did was kept me playing the games as often as i wanted, funding the next few buy ins etc etc

i think from experience and watching very very few will hit top 3 20% of the time

going back to the OP, far better in my opinion to be a piecemeal staker as and when packages go up rather than commit to something as a medium term arrangement

ask Simon Galloway questions, no one better than to advise.

Run those numbers, & you'll not cover the buy-ins for the 100 MTT's, or at best only cover them marginally.

Turn the numbers upside down.

Fail to cash 80% of the time.

Cash small (4th - 10th) 14% of the time.

Cash top 3 6% of the time. Assume an average of 2nd place. 100 runners comp, £55 Buy-In, £5,000 Prize Poool, what would 2nd pay, £800? 6 x £800 = £4,800. Our Buy-Ins cost us £5,500.

We have not considered exs yet.

We must be misunderstanding each other, it's simply not possible to "make a living" on those numbers, even if they could be achieved.

How do you define "make a living"? £200 per week? How many Live MTT's per week do we need to play, & finish Top 3, to end up with £200 per week profit AFTER exs? That's EVERY week, not some weeks.

2 blank weeks - perfectly normal - & now we need to make £600 this week.

We need to make £600 this week to cover our last 3 weeks wages.  Assuming one £55 mtt a night for 6 nights a week we also have to make an additional £990 this week to cover the 18 £55 buy ins for the last 3 weeks comps.  Therefore in week 3 we have to cash for nearly £1600 in 6 £50 mtts to achieve our weekly wage of £200 over the 3 weeks in question.  As Tikay states this ignores all expenses other than rake.  

You are perfectly right Sir, in my stupidity I was assuming we are making 20 quid an hour as per the post I responded to originally. Lesson learned. If you run it over a course of 100 MTT you would indeed be making a loss.

No worries man, we got there in the end.

It worries me - really worries me - when these threads say stuff like that, & youngsters get it in their head that they can go play Live MTT's & turn a living. They can't, (unless they are quite exceptionally talented), & we must not let them think they can, it will end badly.

"Sir"? No need, no need. "Sir" is usually resereved for important peeps, or very old people.

I was described yesterday as a "total fucking clown" by a riggie. Somehow, it seemed so much more appropriate. 

This is without factoring in most mid week comps are shite in local Luton events and get nowhere near 1600 ftw although the expense is similar.

Even great players like me with an incredible conversion rate would have to move back in with me mum if I couldn't fall back on a 6 figure salary

just to clear something up, does it make a difference at all if you play higher buy in events, say 1K over the same period. I guess this will end in the same way, but the prize pools will differ a lot (1M for ukpc main event, compared to 200K for GUKPTs)

I think Adam has it about right when he says unless you're regularly playing £1ks or higher, you simply cannot make a living out of just live tournaments. Even if you are really good. And no offence, but if OP's friend was really good then something tells me the thread wouldn't be here in the first place.

I would put the odds of this working out well at 1000/1. I think it's best to be brutally honest, as Tikay said, so many people are sold down the river and they think it's possible to quit the day job and make it playing nightly comps in the local casino - it simply isn't.

@ugotnuts yes it makes a huge difference because a 20% ROI on a £1k comp is £200. So that's £200 that you'll "earn" in EV by entering the tournament. A much higher ROI, 50% on a £50 is £25. So that's £25 you'll "earn" in EV by playing.

£25 over an average of say 3 or 4 hours, and then there's expenses - it's clearly absolute pennies. However £200 in EV makes it worth a bit of petrol and a hotel if you make day 2 (I think Adam was wrong to include hotels in his calculations, 70% of the time you won't make day 2 and won't need a hotel so I'd factor that in, also factoring in meals seems kinda silly. It's not like you don't eat if you don't play the tournament).  

This is why you don't see (many) professionals playing the £50 grand prix or this £100 ukpc mini (at least not the live day 1s). Because your long term hourly is pennies and good professionals know this. If you can play the online day 1s and play your other tournaments alongside it then it's fine, you can add a extra fiver or tenner to your hourly and once you make day 2 it'll be worth the expenses for sure. But travelling to play the live day 1 for x hours where your EV is gonna be <£50 just isn't a good choice for a professional player.

Yeah point taken. I think I also confused myself by excluding the buy in from the ROI. When its clearly saying your making 200 quid on top of your 1K investment.

I love you Glen.

Interesting, on lots of points.  We played a lot of tournys around the same era, my result keeping wasn't as meticulous as yours but certainly by 2010 or so the game was changing.  Terrible players were less common, which meant that most players were at least capable of pacing their stack well enough to give you one tight spot before exiting.  Of course, that saw variance increase exponentially and even in 2015 I see players make re-raises on the river where even a call can't possibly be good, but it certainly happens less than it used to.

Given the choice of being piecemeal or a medium term arrangement, then the latter is much much much better IF AND ONLY IF you have a good horse.  And you won't know if you have a good horse until they go into a chunk of arrears.  Will they still play the same, will they only be interested in playing the larger buyin tournys on the week now as there's "no point" in playing the smaller stuff?  Will they become gunshy during run-bad and fail to move their stack around when they should?  Or will they go the other way and start banging every spot, trying to win every tourney from 6 tables out in order to magi-bink clear the MU.  Or will they suddenly have other things to attend to and now hardly play.

There was a massive element in OP that honesty was no issue ~ great if that's the case but there are literally thousands of ways you can get screwed, and very few ways to prevent it.  Some of them would be almost inadvertent, while others would be more sinister.  I won't bother listing them as I'll assume the assumption is good that it can't possibly be an issue.

So we know that grinding £50 mtts every night is impossible.  Which means either the player has to be very solid at cash and not play mtts (and now their action is completely unauditable apart from random observation {in terms of quality control as well as results reported})

Before the player gives up the day job (assuming the day job isn't minimum wage and insta-replacable) I'd recommend having them grind some 180s online or some low stakes cash.  While variance will always cloud clear judgments on small samples, if the player has fundamental shortcomings they will get exposed quickly online.  If the player can beat online, then you have the potential to have a longer term arrangement with them (expenses now go waaaay down, yes you still have to eat but a bowl of shreddies and a can of soup costs less than a burger and fries at the casino, never mind travel costs, tips, waiting around for games to start/seats to open etc) You could create a hybrid agreement where when in X of profit they gave the local casino a live spin  in the monthly £100-er or whatever.  If the player can't beat online, he is also very unlikely to be 50% ROI+ material live either.  In which case, I suspect piecemeal would be your best shot, but still quite likely to be heavy going.

Absolutely everyone here in the know has priced it up as 1000/1 material as presented.  That's because they have either tried to do it, or know of plenty that have, and have seen the pitfalls involved.  Put another way, if you can't immediately recall 20 different strokes pulled by renowned horses, then you simply haven't been around poker long enough to truly understand what you are doing, and that's not meant to be remotely unkind.

So many people have rose tinted glasses when it's comes to local reg/local comps.

They see the same guys playing the same comps every day so of course they are gonna final often in these 50 runner tournies.

Some guy with a bit of cash then thinks hey ill stake XYZ as it is an easy transition from these to the £200-500BI comps  with 300+ runners and promptly does his brains.

Very good for the poker economy tho as this happens regularly up and down the land. Whenever I travel to play GUKPTs/GPS you will always get a couple of local players who are seen as being sick good but usually are poor/average.

Anyone who claims they make a living from live MTTs are  being subsidised by the dole/cash in hand jobs or are just running insane for the last year.

Live cash is a different proposition but the trust involved is huge.

IMO it's not worth getting involved with. 

This gets my Best Blond Post nomination 2015.

Just thought i would let you all know the decision that i have made, i read all those remarks and taking all things into consideration this is the outcome.

I am old school when its comes to business and my social life - trust and honour.

The lad that wants to go pro is young but has got potential as we all have, at the moment his a rec player.

I have decided not to bank roll him, not for financial reasons but i would rather he paddled his own canoe - instead i am gifting him enough to play some reasonable buy in MTT, if he turns out to be a good pro he can give me the money back if he loses it so be it.

This means that there is no pressure on him either way.

Thanks to all those who made an input

Think what you can do for others

paddling his own canoe.

with someone else's oars.

if you want to make a difference in someone's life, there are hundreds of decent charities you can donate to rather than letting some kid sort of kind of maybe feel like a pro MTTer for a day.

good luck with that.

See negativity - you dont know me or how much i give to charity if you cant say anything thats positive/critical construtive i find its best to keep stum

you're right. i don't know you.

in case it's not clear, my constructive criticism is find something more constructive to do with your money than give it to some recreational poker player.

regardless of however much money you have, and however much you donate to charity, do something more constructive with this money.

Or he could just spend his hard-earned money how he wants...

Why would anyone here want to dissuade people from pumping a significant amount into the poker economy?

Your thinking during this thread seems bizarre, to be kind at best.

To go from asking for advice on staking to gifting money to the kid ... so you can 'do good for others'? If your motivation is to help another human being I can think of a gazillion more positive ways for you to spend your spare cash.... giving money to a young, wannabe pro out of goodness is just wrong on so many levels.

In this kid's case, you would be encouraging a habit for a game he's not yet proven he can beat, and which probability suggests he will not, which in turn could lead him to spending much more of his own money, no doubt less disposable than your cash(!), having gotten a 'taste' for the bigger games. If he wants to be a pro, fair enough, but let him work his way up with his own money from small stakes and earn his stripes first.

The £20 hourly quite clearly came from a GPS which is a £440 buyin, 9x the £50 abi given here.

I'm aware your roi can be much higher than 50% over a single tournament, but this doesn't mean it will be over a group of say 1000 tournaments. It is very hard to have a huge roi in 100 runner fields, and 50% is probably a reasonably fair estimate for a good (relative to the field) player in a £50 comp.

Interesting thread and not to see several misconceptions come to the surface.

Rfqqqabc  and Simon Galloways have spoken lots of sense so far, imo. And others.

I mentioned this in another topic recently (re: 888). People tend to overestimate how high their ROI is when the first prizes are bigger. Eg, how much bigger is your ROI in the big game vs the Grand Prix? My guess is it’s bigger but not by lots even though the first prize is 4-5 times higher in the GP.

As has been pointed out, you have to work out your weekly buy ins and guess an ROI (which will always be wrong probably).

A lot of “pros” livelihood hinges on them running above EV quite significantly, and they do not realise it. This gets worse when people chase the big scores and play in large field events too often.

I doubt there is a better local casino to have than DTD, (don’t know much about London ones but it’s a fair guess imo). It’s my opinion that you cannot a living playing the full DTD mtt schedule **long term**. Unless you think your long term ROI is 100%, and your expenses are very low.

I do agree that it’s much more doable at cash, but this person needs to be extremely trustworthy AND willing to never leave a casino on the weekend as that’s where the value comes from presumanly.

OP, you seem like a really good guy and I hope it works out for you/him so he can pay you back.

I'd certainly never tell anyone what to do with their money, if they ask for advice then to some degree I think they are permitting me to tell them what I think they should do with their money, but ultimately if they want to build a cash bonfire at the bottom of the garden and set fire to it KLF-style, then that is their right.

If it was a young kid I liked but that was about it, then all of the advice in this thread holds true for exploring situations that might get the balance between providing opportunity and actually having a snowball's chance of working out.  It can't be done.  To donate to him however much money you like is one way out, I don't really see the point, but it is your money after all.

If it was my nephew, and they wanted to open a restaurant, I woudn't buy them a restaurant.  I'd tell them/help them to serve an apprenticeship with a high quality chef for a couple of years, learn all there is to know about all aspects of it and then maybe buy them a restaurant, or take a piece of it.

If it was my nephew and they wanted to become a poker pro, I'd encourage them to serve their apprenticeship, beating small games, use some of the money to buy them subscriptions and build up to the point where they have a demonstrable track record of success and some bankroll behind them, before agreeing to stake them.  I'd try and use the rest of the money to help them find opportunities/pay for training in non-poker careers too.  It's going to be a bleak future for most youngsters starting out in poker nowadays, passing a few exams and getting a £20k job with some career potential is going to be a better move for most.

I don't see that throwing him a pot of money to have a spin with helps anyone here, but as ^^ it is yoru money, your choice, and longer term you aren't hurting anyone outside of the arrangement, so no-one will mind.

Great post, agree 100%.

Thanks to those who gave their views.

The chap in question had a hard up bringing more than most, so as my donation will not affect my life if he only lives the dream for a short while it will give him an experience.

Oh and by the way those who made the effort to contribute made a lot of good sense and helpful remarks, a lot of which i agree with i think that if you really want to go pro you need to have a very strong bank roll, play a lot of cash and look at MTT,s as the icing on the cake.

Cheers

what happens if he loses, you don't want to top him up but he feels addicted to having a lot of chips deep in tournaments and finds the wrong way to acquire money.


this is not helping him.

great post simon.

Getting staked or bankrolled at the start of a career is such a bad idea, people need to "learn the trade" and start from the bottom - run it up, going broke, running it up and going broke before getting it right is how you learn, the only way to truly understand and respect money in gambling is to gamble you own money (not saying never to be backed ofc, but time and place). Starting someone out without this is only going to lead to huge problems regarding his approach and attitude to gambling, imo.

Best thing to do with this lad, buy %'s of him in comps and cash games, freeroll him the odd comp when you fancy it, travel to some tourneys with him for a bit of morale. Keep his head level and spirits up, that'll give him the best chance at making a go of poker.

Other problem you have is its almost guaranteed he is not yet a winning poker player (no disrespect intended and I dont know him at all obviously) but it should take a good yr/2 to get to the stage of a winning player - you can't expect to just jump straight in at the top.

Gifting him some money is obviously a nice gesture but I think dripping it to him in drips and drabs as he needs a little boost whilst mostly he plays his own money will be the better system. As it stands he's prolly going to lose the money you've given him :(
Either way it's a nice gesture - there is an upside for you too as if he does somehow go on to big things you'll doubtless get pieces of action the whole way!

As has been said though ofc it's pretty unlikely, because poker nowadays is so fiercely competitive. I've been playing full time for nearly 7 years, the first two years I was not winning - constantly scrapping about running it up and down and then one day it clicked and I got it going, if I were to attempt again from scratch now with zero money and zero ability I would give myself 3-5% chance of success and I think I would be in top % of people suited to a life in pro poker.

great post, agree 100%

Utterly bizarre thread, from wanting to stake someone, and it end's up being a donation/ gift,

OP:PS: This is not a financial decision on my part it is a moral decision on whats best for him.

I really can't see how giving someone a lump of money - are they even a winning player?? - is going to help them if they lose it all, what then?

Really struggling to see how this is genuine, of course there could be something missing from the OP he doesn't want to mention.

There's just something not right about this the various posts totally contradict themselves.

All the advice given has been spot on, play online with your own money build up a bankroll etc etc

If this was genuine surely you'd be telling him to play/ or atleast build up experience to some extent online.

If this is real, and you wanted to help this person giving them this money, gift/ whatever you want to call it, could be causing more damage.

Not to mention it's totally bizarre you'd want to give money to this person, unless of course it was a family member.

I'm a start giving money to people I don't like cause it's bad for them..rofl

Give the boy the dosh I say

Send him over to Vegas with a lump, imo.

There used to be a very soft 5/10 game at the Venetian...

Bloke turned up at are poker club did not know him that well, during the night he mentioned his van had broken down and was going to be off the road - i said no worries mate i got a spare van you can borrow, i think you might find that kind gestures do not hurt.

I also have invested in many start ups - business plans mean jack shit - its always the people you invest in that count.

Its just the way i am and is probably why i will never be rich like a lot of my mates  - but i do not care life is for living and

I think more people should be kind enough to help others if able... Although it does open you up to be exposed.

If your happy in what you are doing after seeking advise in the forum then it must be right for you.

UgotNuts

Been like it all my life use to give other kids my school dinner tickets - only ever been had once - cant say what happened as i would not want to incriminate myself.

Whether your out of work, skint or rich, even people that i really dont like if you help out and it is hurting you to do so you should always try.

We all end up dead at sometime and as far as i know you only get 1 shot at life

Cheers

Nailed it.