Who Makes Money From Professional Poker?

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This might be the most accurate poker reporting I've seen from a mainstream journalism entity.

👍︎︎ 17 👤︎︎ u/Chinchillaisgod 📅︎︎ May 21 2019 🗫︎ replies

Begin segment by asserting that staking is where the real money is in poker, then spend the back half advertising for Youstake and Stake kings, now that the viewer is buttered up and wants to get in on the staking action. Nice.

👍︎︎ 18 👤︎︎ u/Hwamie 📅︎︎ May 21 2019 🗫︎ replies

TLDR?

👍︎︎ 9 👤︎︎ u/KittenCrusades 📅︎︎ May 21 2019 🗫︎ replies

Super well done overall, which is rare for mainstream media on gambling topics (last decent thing I heard was the NPR Planet Money staking segment). Ryan is a great ambassador

👍︎︎ 7 👤︎︎ u/Furples 📅︎︎ May 21 2019 🗫︎ replies

Haven't even clicked it but did they really let "They Money Behind Pro Poker" get off the editing room floor for a CNBC production? Also the house/rake obv answer

👍︎︎ 8 👤︎︎ u/Texturecomment 📅︎︎ May 21 2019 🗫︎ replies

Wow this is a huge ad, damn.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/acespre 📅︎︎ May 22 2019 🗫︎ replies

Reddits own /u/protential, I remember when you first one that bracelet! Nice vid mate.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/Nokthar 📅︎︎ May 22 2019 🗫︎ replies

Interesting. Nothing I wasn't already aware of, but still learned a few things. Didn't know what a stable was. Nice to see that the SEC dropped their investigation into YouStake.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/modern_julius 📅︎︎ May 21 2019 🗫︎ replies

They money...

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/budd222 📅︎︎ May 22 2019 🗫︎ replies
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For nearly two decades ESPN broadcasts and an account named Moneymaker have given rise to a generation of poker players dreaming of turning professional and earning millions. I think everybody is just chasing those big six figure seven figure scores. But poker is a game of high risk - It's worse than the stock market to a very significant degree. - and high reward. I took home about seven hundred thousand dollars. That money was won despite never entering a casino. Poker is for sure. Not always what it seems. It makes it sexier when you think that a player's taking home you know 10 million dollars. In reality a lot of these players aren't taking home even half that sometimes. Apparently some players. Agree to sell a part of their winnings in return for guaranteed cash up front. So how did you do that and how much of that what is it eight almost nine million dollars will you actually keep after tax. It's called staking poker staking is having someone put up money for another poker player to use normally to enter a poker tournament. I did sell some pieces to some friends just to just to give them swats. Pretty much everybody I know that is in poker is at least selling action or swapping action or is staked full time. I really don't know anybody who doesn't do it once in a while. Backing and staking are the financial lifeblood of tournament poker. For years it took place between poker professionals, but today entrepreneurial players hope to open it to the world. We wanted to make it really simple for both the pros, the players, and the people the fans to get in on some action or sell some action whatever side you're on with more access comes regulation and uncertainty. It was an investigation trying to figure out this business model from fans to amateurs to pros staking is the most common method of success and survival in poker. Playing poker for a living is incredibly tricky. Lot of people come out to Los Vegas with absolutely bright eyed dreams and leave on a Greyhound bus. Not that many years later realizing that couldn't come to pass. The amount of variance involved in tournaments is astronomical. It's honestly it's worse in the stock market to a very significant degree. So a lot of professional poker players sit back and say OK I know I can make money if I enter as many poker tournament as possible because the law of large numbers is then on my side and having the financial wherewithal to withstand that can be difficult. Whether online or at a casino. Players must put up a buy-in, the minimum amount to sit at a table Buy-ins can range from a few dollars to thousands or even a million. The higher the buy-in the bigger the payout. Let's say you're a professional living in Las Vegas and you play in a mostly three hundred thousand dollar buy-in tournament and you ran like a five hundred dollar average buy-in. I would say to be comfortably rolled for those games you need about a hundred thousand dollar poker specific bankroll and then you should also have about a year's living expenses as well saved up. You know if you're living like a normal middle class lifestyle in Vegas am I running about four grand a month so you would need 150 thousand dollars total bankroll. This is where staking comes in. Poker staking is having someone put up money for another poker player to use normally to enter a poker tournament. In return they receive part of your upside. So by way of example someone would enter the World Series of Poker for ten thousand dollars. They may say all right I'm gonna put up four thousand dollars of my own money and I'm gonna go raise six thousand dollars from backers. Backers love it because it gives them an opportunity to have an interest in the outcome of a poker event. And some of these poker tournaments, especially up top, pay exponential returns. You can make 250 300 times the money you give your stakes poker player if he or she does well, Stake poker players got a bigger bankroll they can play more tournament they can make more money over the long run, pros need it to give themselves the exposure to enter as many tournaments as they can. Semi-pros often need it to help make the next step up. There's just something about not having that pressure and not having to risk any of your own money ever it's it's just very freeing To understand the popularity of poker, you have to go back two decades. This was 2003 the Internet and hit 1998 movie "Rounders" paved the way for Chris Moneymaker's World Series of Poker win. He'd earned a seat at the table by playing online poker on a site called PokerStars an accountant one day and 2.5 million dollars richer the next. This fairy tale story launched poker into the mainstream, becoming known as the Moneymaker Effect. Like a lot of people in poker I got in when Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker in 2003. I deposited some money in an online poker site and pretty much fell in love with it right away. I was playing poker around 13, 14 years old at a soccer camp. A friend of mine brought in plastic chips and we just started playing. We saw it on TV it's around the Moneymaker time 2003 and ESPN was on and we started playing just with a group of guys. I first got into poker much like most people my age. I just watched it on TV. Growing up Chris Moneymaker with his amazing last name won the World Series main event and he was just this amateur player and kind of gave a lot of just average people like me the idea that I could be playing poker just like these guys on TV. The World Series of Poker became must see TV on ESPN. The entries for the ten thousand dollar buy-in Main Event tripled in the year after Moneymaker won, doubled in 2005, and reached a new height in 2006. And it grew and grew and grew and people would enjoy playing poker online. They'd go to their local casino and that meant more casinos kept coming because there is a financial demand for it and the fields for live poker tournaments, live poker cash games got bigger and bigger. Increased popularity meant more players with dreams of turning pro and a demand for financial backers. Unless playing tournament poker is your retirement strategy or what you want to do with a trust fund or some well-placed inheritance or your spouse's income. If that's the only way you're looking to make money in the poker world being backed is almost essential. It is the financial currency that keeps the poker world afloat. Staking works in one of two ways. The short term agreement is buying and selling action. Action is another term for just buying a piece or buying a percentage or buying shares in a poker player. And usually for a markup. Think of it as a service fee. If the player wins or cashes. The buyer receives a percentage of the winnings pro-rata to the investment. If the player loses the buyer loses. If I see a player posting about having action for sale and I know that they're pretty good and they have you know a reasonable markup on that yeah I'll just buy it. The most I've won from buying a piece of a tournament was from one of my good friends Jake Balsiger in the World Series main event. He ended up getting third place for about three and a half million dollars and I had about 17 percent of him. I took home about seven hundred thousand dollars. A friend of mine Thomas Cannuli and I had I think five other guys who we bought. We split up a piece with, and I just remember when he made that final table. It was so exciting because I guaranteed a million I had around 15 percent. You're talking about a fifteen hundred dollar investment roughly who is guaranteed a million now. It was it was very, very fun. Alternately, a player can agree to a long term backing deal, which means a backer, or the investor fronts all of the money for the games a player enters. Revenue is split 50/50. Lisa Costello is part of a stable or a group of poker players backed by one or more people. Each poker player in the stable is called a horse. At this point in time I had been playing full time for about a year and a good friend of mine who I've known most of my life offered to stake me full time so I said yeah let's do it. The terms of that staking were pretty standard, which is 50/50 split with a make up. The biggest difference between buying action and a long term backing agreement: player must pay back debt before taking a cut of the revenue. If a player is in the red they are in makeup. If I play 10 grand in tournaments and I bust through all of them my next tournament score that 10 grand has to be paid back to that backer. Prior to splitting those profits in a 50/50 fashion. The tournament I typically play run anywhere from four hundred to sixteen hundred bucks per tournament. But then in the summer I'll play a few bigger buy-ins including the ten thousand dollar main event. Ryan Laplante is a 2016 World Series of Poker winner earning him a coveted bracelet. It's like a boxing belt. He's part of a stable called Team 6-5-1. I've been with my current backers since 2015. I've been with them for four years now. I don't really have a set bankroll with them. I essentially just say hey guys I want to play this event. They're like Okay. Sweet. That's it. A lot of backers are willing to sort of train their stables give their stables insight, go over hand histories with their stables and that not only gives them the financial wherewithal to make it as a poker pro, but it gives them some coaching on the side. Definitely would not be the player I am today without their backing and coaching and mentoring I wont have my bracelet I wouldn't be playing high stakes right now so you know finding someone like that to really help grow me as a player has been you know ridiculously powerful and just so so profitable for me and for them. Despite the freedom of playing with someone else's money. Players carry the weight of debt. I've ironically had my worst year of poker ever which is crazy because during that time I was getting coached and studying a ton. So right now I'm in make-up for about fifty thousand. The deepest I've ever been in make-up was ninety thousand dollars and in order to get out I had to face my mindset really work hard on my game stopped tilting and I needed to run well and it all kind of came together and I made like a hundred and twenty grand over the next like six weeks and cleaned out a make-up and got a good profit chop and all that kind of stuff. When you have that much make-up it definitely sucks but obviously you want to get out of it. So you're definitely not going to stop playing. Having said that I try to be responsible in choosing my tournaments so I'm not just going to go and fire away at twenty five hundred dollar buy-ins and get it even higher than it already is. As difficult as it can be to turn a profit in poker, backing arrangements do pay off. Under them I've probably cashed for two and a half million dollars. I've had a bracelet, four World Series of Poker final tables, I've won hundreds and hundreds of thousand dollars online. The last two and a half years alone I'm probably profiting around a million dollars pure profit. The tables so it's been a very good you know deal for both of us. If I had the opportunity I don't think it mattered how much I made in poker. I would love to always be staked. For other players with cash to invest full time backing and running a stable becomes a business. Over the last few years playing poker and buying pieces in tournaments have been the most lucrative for me and I would say those are about equal. Full time backing so far has not been very profitable but I'm hoping to make it the most profitable in the future. Derrick Walters has backed roughly 20 players over the last four years and backs five currently. I think what first got me into banking was just this magical idea that I could make passive income just with the extra poker money that I made that I have nothing to do with like owning a rental property or maybe owning some stocks. Now I kind of see it as a more all encompassing like partnership where I'm just trying to make these guys like the best humans that they can be. And then a side effect is that they're going to have success in poker. Some agreements are on paper while others are a handshake. There's a lot of trust between both parties. So no one runs off with the money. Derek only works with people he's known for at least a year. I will have anywhere from fifty thousand two hundred thousand invested at once so the players will be holding that amount of money or even more of that will be in make-up. An agreement can end anytime. However if the backer ends the agreement and the player is in make-up the backer forfeits the debt. If the player decides to end the agreement and is in make-up usually he or she will quit poker. For the guys I back, I would say if they're living up to their potential doing their best I think these guys can make between fifty thousand and a hundred thousand dollars playing poker a year for each of them. I would be able to make half of that or less for the better performing players because I'll have to give them a higher percentage of the profit for their good performance. What If I told you, that this, is not, a dream This isn't fantasy as usual... It's better The fan and the pros have never had a way for them to connect besides like through social media and things like that. But there'd be no way really for Antonio Esfandiari as an example to sell action to some random person in Denmark. State Kings invites professional poker players to sell action in upcoming tournaments. Fans can buy the action for a markup and if the player wins the fan wins it makes it really simple for our users to buy action and anybody they want on the platform. Once a package closes for a pro the money is automatically transferred to that pros cashier and then from there the pro can cash out to their bank. Pay Pal whatever it may be then it just makes the process seamless and really simple but also really safe. State Kings has close to 50 thousand users and over one hundred fifty poker pros listing action including Antonio Esfandiari, Brian Rast and Jeff Gross. Here we are boys the ones. A site like Stake Kings is just right place right time. It's really for me I use it for an engagement tool where on my site on my twitch stream people always ask me I get messages Twitter messages DMs hey can I buy a piece or I'll stake you or can you do this well on this platform instead of having to text 10 friends or two friends even because they're, I'll be honest the annoying part of staking is the accounting because it's like you have to keep track you've got pieces you gotta collect you've got to give all that. So it's a little bit of a a little bit of a work right. You don't want to. You'd rather do it at the one or two guys and 10 people well Stake Kings handles all that. Players like Jeff Gross are driving millions of dollars in buying and selling action In 2018 we sold a total of six million dollars in total action that we sold on our platform and we'll usually take around a 10 percent transaction fee. Some of those are promotional packages where we won't take any fee at all. Take 5 percent fees. So our revenue overall is going to be between that you know three hundred to six hundred thousand and revenue on the six million in sales. There's also YouStake. Founded in October 2013 it takes an open approach. YouStake is an online platform that allows fans from across the world to go ahead and back Poker players. And it's for any poker player. We don't just have pros we have pros we have semi-pros we have recreational players. So basically gives anybody a chance to try to raise money to play in events. It's really allowing folks to safely and securely and transparently back somebody and know what's happening and know they're going to get paid. Backers and players come from 109 different countries. Despite a smaller user base, YouStake also attracts top players to sell action including Greg Raymer, Todd Brunson, Phil Helmuth, Johnny Chan and Mike Matusow. I can give some numbers It's a private company so I can't do all but I can tell you that we've got well over fourteen thousand users on our system today. We've been growing that about 4x year over year. Our revenue has been going up. We've been pretty much doubling almost every year staking may not have been new for the poker community but it was for the mainstream. And with any new concept problems can arise. Not long after I became general counsel to YouStake and we were taking care to sort of button up all of its affairs and make sure everything was squeaky clean in case prying eyes ever looked at its books we discovered that prying eyes were in fact going to be looking at books. YouStake received a subpoena from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, which would launch an investigation into its activities It was a investigation by the S.E.C. into YouStake and the business. And the S.E.C.was basically looking into whether or not YouStake was involved in the purchase and sale of securities because people are buying pieces of poker players and those poker players are going to go make or lose money for their backer based on what happens in a game. Up to that point we had gotten quite a bit of press so I don't know if that's what draws their attention to it. YouStake was ready for this scrutiny because it was a squeaky clean operation that was doing everything aboveboard. So the first thing we did was assess the scope of the subpoena produce documents and every time the S.E.C. said jump, We said how high. We turned over I believe tens of thousands of pages of documents. Long story short it took forever. So then we finally said you know what, You know there's a couple outcomes that come from this. So let us put an application in to FINRA. and FINRA being the licensing arm basically of the S.E.C.. So we put an application in for a crowdfunding license And I got a phone call from FINRA a couple weeks later saying please withdraw your application and my jaw sort of hits the ground and I don't really know why they do this. I press the guy and said why is it. Well it's not really a security and I'm thinking myself. All right. That's strange. So look at the guy from FINRA on the phone I said hold on one second. Call my associate. Tell her to come into the room and I say sir please repeat that. And he says we don't think it's a security because you can't fill out a balance sheet. And that's true. You're not buying and selling a piece of an entity a poker player doesn't have a balance sheet a poker player cannot go on the New York Stock Exchange. Right. Like if a poker player had to list his or her assets we're pretty much talking about kidneys and other vital organs which I'm fairly confident you can't sell in the United States anyway. To show good faith we went dark. The site was still there, people could still post but we did no overt advertising at all no social nothing. We just went quiet. YouStake wasn't getting answers in a timely fashion and losing money. That's when their attorney made a decision that was unprecedented. I said all right we want to bring an end to this. Let's file a lawsuit against the S.E.C. seeking a declaratory judgment which is a judicial decree basically that staking is not the purchase or sale of a security. And I think this caught a lot of people off guard because it's always the S.E.C. that's going out and suing someone. We started going through that process and that's when the S.E.C. came back and said no it's OK. We were dropping everything. You're good to go. And we reached an agreement that we would dismiss the case. So no precedent was made. Investigations over. And it is the S.E.C. stated position as sought in discovery in federal court that YouStake was not dealing in securities. From the year before to the area went dark we dropped 2x in revenue. From the time we went back live up we went up 5x from the year that we were dark. It had a massive effect on us absolutely. There's no judicial decrease saying we won but we won. The dream of playing poker professionally and taking home stacks of money on live TV draws many to Las Vegas and staking is one way to ensure you never lose all of your chips. I think you can run much higher edges and in buying pieces and action and people than you can in pretty much any other industry when it comes to investing and buying actually real estate you name it. I think poker run some of the highest edges. I'm proud of you know being backed. I mean that means that there is a you know person who has faith in my skill and that you know thinks that I'm capable of doing very well. If you wanted to look at the guys the top top players are now professionals there's a lot of work there's a lot of stuff you can do to get better and you know it's it's really easy to learn but the master does take a long time and I'm still learning every day and that's part of why I love it.
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Channel: CNBC
Views: 2,161,809
Rating: 4.6721411 out of 5
Keywords: CNBC, business news, finance stock, stock market, news channel, news station, breaking news, us news, world news, cable, cable news, finance news, money, money tips, financial news, Stock market news, stocks, poker game, pokerstarts, poker hands, how to make money playing poker, how poker is played, top poker moments in history, how much do poker players make
Id: QxWNNkxpSh8
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Length: 21min 48sec (1308 seconds)
Published: Tue May 21 2019
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