Champion of Poker

Playing poker professionally holds a lot of attraction. Plenty of free time, lots of opportunities to make money considering the skills you should have if you turn professional, and plenty of Texas Hold’em to help wile away the hours. What could be better? The realities of the tournament trail, however, are a little different. Even players you know to have had a big win are often not as rich as you may think and there is a whole culture of staking, borrowing and high risk involved with life as a professional poker player who specialises in poker tournaments.

The costs of playing poker tournaments as your main source of income are high. Paying for flights, hotels, food and general spending increase when you are travelling the tournament circuit and you also have the tournament buy-ins to pay for too! Things get very pricey very quickly. I have read numerous blogs of tournament professionals who say that you need about $500,000 to $1 million a year to finance life on the road if you are constantly travelling and playing poker.

This is why many poker players look for stakes and take percentages of other players. Relying simply on your own skills is difficult. Could you cash for $1 million each year just to break even? Would you want those sorts of overheads? This leads us to another part of being a tournament professional, engaging financially with other players.

When I first started researching the realities of life on the road as a professional poker tournament player I was surprised at the extent of swapping percentages with other players and staking. It is not uncommon for one player to have 50% of their own action and 10% of five other players’ action. This means that if they bust they have five other chances to make some money back from the tournament. They have done a straight swap or bought straight into the other players.

Tournament stakers also roan around the casino lobbies looking for players who need a stake in return for some of their action. Eric “Sheets” Haber is a prolific staker who had a large piece of Joe Cada when he won $8.5 million when he won the World Series of Poker Main Event. Neil “Badbeat” Channing of the UK also stakes a large stable of players. They get good value for their money as they only stake players they know to be winning players and you are unlikely to get a stake into a tournament unless you can show an excellent record in live and online poker tournaments.

The reason I play poker is looking for that one big score. If I hit that score, travelling the tournament circuit only to be broke two or three years down the line would seem a waste of that big prize. Others would disagree and see the freedom of living life to the full as a great way of using that money. After all, you never know what life will throw at you tomorrow. I prefer a safer approach, although most poker players do not live life particularly safely in terms of financial planning.

You need a liberal attitude to money to be a tournament pro. You need to be willing to risk it to win big and keep risking it and believe you will eventually get everything back that you invest with interest! It can be a bumpy ride as a tournament poker professional, but if you have the guts and the tenacity the rewards can be very high if you are good enough.

By Malcolm Clarke