Poker Hedge Fund

[The Gift Of Gab]

Your comparison of a poker bot army to a computerized trading strategy is totally spurious and makes it clear that you have no concern for the ethics of poker or for the longevity of the online game. At best you are painfully ignorant and at worst calculating scum.

[nycballer]

i wrote a business plan for a final project on an almost identical concept dealing solely with live tournament pros, which i think would be far easier logistically than cash game players and even using a pool of players that I trusted in ability and integrity there were some very tough obstacles.

I think the biggest problem you will run into however is that once these staked players of yours win good money(which in cash games could be a matter of weeks) they will want to drop the backing arrangement and play their own money. The basic premise behind the success of such an idea produces a high turnover rate that will make a decent player base unsustainable. You want to back great players. Great players will inevitably win and want to play their own money. There is not a big enough pool of great players to keep replacing those that want to play on their own money after success at being staked.

[Kirkrrr]

Dingo,

I think this is a very interesting concept and something I have thought of myself, but on a smaller scale. I think the thing that a lot of guys who're saying "why would anyone be interested?" are ignoring is that variance breeds variance, ie I know some excellent players with a ton of raw talent but worse emotional control and zero [censored] bankroll management that are always broke. Those types of players, if you stick them into an organized fund and force them to play smart, I think would become hugely winning players once you offset their individual weakness... since the weakness is not in their game but in other areas.

Also, what wolffund says fully applies - being a part of a successful enterprise is usually more profitable in the long run (provided you're at the top of the enterprise, obviously) than going at it the self-employed way.

I also think, to a point, you might be looking at it backwards. Why take a player killing 5/10nl and stick him into 3/6 for lower variance? It's a waste of skill and his time. Instead, take the same player and put him in 10/20, and start grooming him for 25/50. He obviously has the talent, and with an infinite bankroll of a hedge fund behind him, he can play the type of aggressive, fearless poker that is tougher to do when you're playing on your own money, and is a total BITCH to play against (look up Farha vs Rugby thread). Can you even imagine the havoc a bunch of young, aggressive, talented poker players can cause if their sole incentive is to perform with zero risk of going broke in the game? - but perhaps get moved down to smaller games if they lose too much at a level (and for a typical competitive poker player, that's a huge incentive to NOT lose).

In all, I think it's an extremely interesting concept, and I look forward to hearing updates about it as and if things develop.

It's also stupid to ignore that 100 people working towards a single goal is >>>>> 1 person doing same.

Kirk

[Dale Dough]

Also, how do you deal with the collusion aspect? Now, five pros can sit and try to fleece one fish. Can you still do that if you're on the same bankroll?

[mak15]

OP,

I think you are vastly overestimating the number of players who would win tons more money if they just had a bigger bankroll. a player who is in reality a winning 100/200 player but magically only has a $5,000 bankroll could probably go from 1/2-100/200 in a year.

[Poker monkey]

I don't know why anyone is giving this arsehole the time of day. He's just interested in taking money out of the poker community to line his own pockets, and none of us can benefit from that. Shame on anyone who wants to associate with him.

As to whether scamming lower limit players out of money using bots is legal or moral, the answer is of course no on both counts, and I sincerely hope any attempt fails miserably.

[True]

a person that doesn't make enough money to move from 5/10 to 25/50 won't be a player that automatically beats 25/50 after increasing his bankroll.

Secondly, once he is happy he is crushing 25/50 I am sure he would just leave the hedge.

Also, you apparently think you are going to increase someones earn / year by 2 or 3x with no variance whilst also only giving them 50% of their profits.

This means moving them up 4-6x the game and hoping they have the same edge, or moving them up 8-12 the stakes and hoping their winrate is half of what it was in the lower games.

This is ridiculously unrealistic.

[justaPlayer]

I am just an average human being and at poker claim only to be "just a player," regardless of my actual skill level or true identity (Part of the reason I don't post here much is that a lot of 2p2 has devolved into name-calling, personal pejoration, and insecure-type dk-swinging to see who can come up w/ the most sarcastic and edgy responses to sh.t, which is all just a waste of time and nobody cares about it.). Having said that and with the qualification that I openly confess to know nothing about the hedge-fund/ big banking industry (I probably don't know too much about poker, either), I see way WAY more opportunities/upside in this thing than negatives, and I think those who don't are being narrow-minded.
Some def. kinks have been brought up, and they will need to be addressed exhaustively if success is to be achieved, but follow this evolution: OP succeeds in securing capital in excess of $100M after a 1-2 yr. trial period at a smaller scale during which all possible problem scenarios are redundantly examined, isolated, and counteracted, and actually realizes a 20% ROI on average for the next 2 years. The possibility of legitimacy, zero risk and big reward ultimately serve to bring throngs of new players into the game, hungry for their own opportunities to be "contracted" and "play for a fund". This on top of the still escalating Poker Boom. Well, the recreational players on the sites are wising up and being driven away, but it doesn't matter because the new players coming in that I just mentioned are actually becoming the new fish (and let's face it, most losing players are completely aware that they are losing players and they still continue to play-- the easy, recreational fish pool will never completely dry up, at any stakes, imo). So there's this whole renaissance of poker happening, ON TOP OF the renaissance that was ALREADY happening. Pretty soon somebody else is gonna start ANOTHER fund. All the while the WSOP and WPT are finally drawing legit advertisers and sponsors such as, say, Lowe's (Planters I think I saw in another thread lol).... Well, sooner or later somebody even BIGGER is gonna say "Why don't we just start a professional league like the NFL? Hell, Lowe's is already sponsoring half these events..." etc, etc. You can see and have "nocturnal emissions" about where it goes from there.
Yes, I fully agree with the logistical concerns voiced in almost every objection I've read, and I think they should be the first concern of anybody starting something like this. But think about how, if successful, it could elevate the game... The permutations are effectively infinite. In my small view, anyway. We might look back at the days when the top guys banked $5 mil a year and laugh, as we do now looking back at our posts from years passed.
Kudos to the vanguard. I say proceed, but with care and circumspection. $.02

[baltostar]

This concept may pay off for those who can put it together fast, but as others jump in the ROE will quickly get squashed.

What you end up with is legions of hedge-fund-backed players playing in a higher stakes bracket where they play each other to a large extent, killing any advantage they initially had.

As the other poster points out, you're not going to get anyone good to play for you at his current levels -- trading all his upside for a salaried job.

Bots only make sense for play at low levels. Real poker-playing bots are a long ways off. All there is for now and on the horizon is pattern-watchers that pick people off. One nice pattern to pick off is another bot's pattern. Problem isn't nearly as bad as I described above, but still pretty bad.