A few years ago, the online poker industry was booming. People from all over the world could play with each other without much of a hustle. The most popular tournaments gathered thousands of players daily, and the cash games were full of action.
Unfortunately, recent years harmed liquidity in online poker a bit. Many countries restricted playing online poker (the USA, we miss you!), some organized their national platforms, and as a result, the global market was split into a few smaller ones.
The players’ preferences also changed. The shift in the popularity of the “classic” online formats is undeniable. The Sit and Go’s almost died, and the cash games became less popular. In fact, only MTTs are still very much alive and well.
The biggest winner of the recent changes is the newest format out there – Spin & Go’s. Spins guarantee a lot of action (more than classic SNGs), give you a potential thrill of winning big (just like MTTs), and do not chain you to a PC or a phone for hours (just like cash games).
What should not be surprising is that many professional poker players decided to change their game of choice to Spins. The best example is our CEO himself – once a tournament crusher, today one of the best Spin & Go players in the world.
As a pro poker player in 2022, you can still make a living (as in, a lot of money)
It’s just not as easy as it was before. The simple strategies that worked a few years ago are not sufficient anymore. As a result, achieving really high win rates is way harder, increasing the variance.
Variance is the villain in the poker world. The bigger the variance in the format of your choice, the more severe your downswings can be. However, let’s not forget it is much easier to blame variance than to admit it’s our own leaks that lead to bad results.
Downswings can be long and painful, especially if you play poker for a living. Is there any solution to ease the potential pain of long losing streaks? We believe poker staking might be one of the remedies.
Poker staking – the best way to succeed in poker long-term
As we’ve already mentioned, there are a few obstacles to an easy living as a professional poker player. Still, there is also good news: the current opportunities are way broader than before. Finding worthy training materials, a study group, or a solid coach is way more accessible nowadays. It’s also much easier to stake someone or become staked.
How does poker staking work?
By default, when you sit down to play poker, you are bringing a certain amount of your money, which you can lose or multiply. When you decide to get staked, you’ll essentially play with someone else’s money, and in return, you will share a part of your winnings with your staker.
There are quite a few ways of conducting a poker staking deal. You may get staked for a specific tournament, a number of tournaments, a single cash game, or even for a longer period.
Pretty much every part of a staking deal is negotiable, and that’s up to a private agreement between the staker and the player being staked. Find out how the coaching for profit deal works here.
With staking, you might be able to play games you wouldn’t play otherwise
Let’s look at a few examples.
You play low- to mid-stakes online MTTs full-time. Your results are fine, but to make a living, you must regularly withdraw a solid chunk of your winnings. A big online poker series is coming up in a few weeks, and you’d like to play tournaments with a higher buy-in than usual.
Let’s say that you plan to play MTTs with a total of $5,000 in buy-ins which is a substantial part of your poker bankroll. You seek a staker among the poker community and are willing to sell 50% of your action (in that case, that would be $2,500). To simplify calculations, you divide your staking offer into 50 pieces, each costing $50. Every piece a potential staker will buy will guarantee them 1% of all of your winnings in the acknowledged tournaments.
How about live games? Imagine you are a live poker grinder and usually play $2/5 at your local casino with great success. Recently you’ve been invited to a higher stakes cash game – $10/25 with many rich, recreational players. You’re likely to be one of the best players in the running, but the amount of cash needed to participate in this game is way higher than your average buy-in. Therefore, you ask your poker friend for a stake. How will you split the potential winnings? It’s up to you, but a 50/50 profit split is usually a good place to start. Here’s one more scenario. You’ve been playing poker for a living for a while, but due to your family life, online MTTs are not a viable option anymore, and you are not into cash games. You’d like to try out the new hot format – Spin & Go’s. You reach out to the best poker school, Smart Spin. We see potential in your poker game soon after you join the Smart Spin community and play poker with the money provided by us.
Playing poker for a living with Smart Spin
How does the last example work, exactly? Playing poker is still a viable career, but it comes with a lot of uncertainty. Our job is to get you tools that will give you as much comfort as possible. Poker staking provided by us is not only money to play. There are also many learning materials, everyday opportunities to become a better player, and technical and social support.
By signing with us, you agree to play a certain number of games on an agreed stake and for a certain period. Should you run bad and get on a downswing, we’ll do our best to help you. If, on the other hand, you’ll start crushing your stakes and would like to move up the stakes, we’ll look into that, too.
Whatever the outcome of our staking deal would be, we’ll do our best to help you succeed. The reason is simple – when you earn money, Smart Spin also does.