Variance… Staking..

Posted by Vinod KK on 2012-12-03 at 12:00 AM

Lot of blogs going around about variance and staking so I thought i will take a swipe at it as well. Donkabomber i think pretty much summarized what variance can do to you. Vinay obviously has written how stressful it can be to be even staked. Although I was pretty disappointed too when he gave up on that deal but i feel he made the right choice. personally i thought this was way to early to get staked and going red on your first staking deal can make you sweat a lot. I think that took a lot of courage on his part and it must have been a tough decision to make. Anyways good luck to him. I am going to take a different approach to this staking mumbo jumbo.

I think staking can work under only two scenario’s. First the backer is a big time investor and the player is a pro. The player has proven his worth and is capable of handling the ups and downs and the backer sufficiently trust the player based on his name and his solid history.
The second scenario is where the player has a lot of potential and the backer is a poker pro himself. He should be able to guide the player throughout his staking deal and help him improve his game and mentor him.
I think only under these two scenarios can the staking deal work. I feel any other scenario it is just inviting more trouble, stress etc etc because during the downswings there is not enough trust/bonds developed to make it a long term success.

People like us just need to hope that someday some poker pro is going to see some potential in us to actually back us. I think that would be the dream scenario. I wish good luck to all those wannabes. But in the meantime I think I have something which might solve this problem called as variance. I am not too sure if this makes sense or not but I am going to give it a shot.

So let us say I and vinay make a deal. (Just an example..:-) So we say we are going to play the PGT main event in December. He pays for his buy in and I pay for mine. The trick is if either one of us make the money then the winner gets his buy in back and the remaining winnings are split 50-50. I am assuming thats how staking works. This is as good as me staking him and he staking me back. This way I feel variance can be countered specially when two growing players:-) are trying to learn the game. I feel both players should have same caliber so that one does not feel being exploited by other and there need to be lot of mutual respect and trust. Same thing if you expand the deal to whole PGT or for let us say the whole month of December i think in the long run it is going to be quite beneficial. So basically we are the horses in the stable and we are our own backers. Obviously the player playing better gets his buy-in first before it is split 50-50 just as a bonus.

Currently I dont think anyone of us have the BR to stake someone else or the caliber to be backed. (No offense I am sure there are few exceptions out there, I am just saying in a true poker world it does not make sense for most of us)

So just a thought guys. I am not currently interested in making any deal as I dont know majority of you guys that well and same applies vice versa but I wanted to just share this and see what kind of response I get and if this thing can be done in a better way. More ideas are welcome or if any one of you are already doing this please do share.