Poker Hedge Fund

[justaPlayer]

The backed players playing each other is what I envisioned (and poorly elucidated) giving rise to the professional leagues where the real money can come in.... I agree that in a vacuum the idea will have a shelf-life and market saturation. It is its function as a catalyst for even bigger things that interested me.

[bap2086]

i just wanna know how i can buy stock in brian townsend. only reason i opened this thread.

[baltostar]

Also, you're probably would have more success selling players various derivatives than finding people to outright back.

Selling puts to players puts a floor underneath (squashing the left side of the curve) and is of value to a some high-variance winning players, especially as they move up levels.

What might really fly is selling bear spreads. This only partially limits a player's downside and upside. A good player might like this because he is concerned with having a losing year (kids in the private school or whatnot), but he is not concerned with having a debacle. An outright put option might be judged too expensive relative to his expected earnings.

[Hume]

If we look at the criteria for when this type of fund would be better for both the player and the fund than the player playing on his own bankroll I think we have:
a) Game requires a very large bankroll.
b) Player is able to beat the game.
c) Player is not able to beat other games with lower bankroll requirements for a higher hourly.

Now lets look at your ideas.

"1. Fund online and cash pros on a % win basis to play for a fund much in the way my traders trade for hedge funds and CTAs"

As already mentioned in the thread this idea (probably) doesn't meet any of the three criterias. At the very least, it would be almost impossible to tell if criteria b is fulfilled beforehand.

"2. This part may or may not be legal or even moral but set up a group of bots to play lower limit and lower no limit online poker on various sites"

This idea doesn't meet criteria a. If you have a bot that only plays low limits you don't need a large bankroll => no need for a hedge fund. Of course, this idea has other (bigger) problems anyway...

"3. A small portion of the fund will be for live tournament pros and online tourny pros..."

Bingo! An idea where at least criteria a is fulfilled. According to anecdotal evidence from this board it should also be pretty easy to find players where criterias b and c are fulfilled. As an added perk you can probably find players where c is not fulfilled that would still play tournaments for the media exposure.

[llleisure]

How do you keep your funded players from just swapping money playing each other - either intentionally or not? Also, wouldn't something like this be subject to almost no regulation? I mean I know hedge funds aren't subject to a whole lot to start with when they're trading regulated financial instruments. So a hedge fund whose purpose is to back people playing poker online = zero regulation?

[The Dingo]

[ QUOTE ]
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.

[/ QUOTE ]

1. Clearly the most "intelligent response" to date but dear man feel free to PM me and I will give you my background, resources and history, none of it is SCUM

2. I have been involved in poker and investment banks for a long time and am well aware of ethics and attempts to grow the game properly. This idea actually came from several top pros and a flawed attempt to set up a new poker tour that would be owned by players and funded by investors and sponsors I had found and capital from my own pocket....problem is there is such a saturation of 2nd rate poker tours and poker on tv that we decided there was no room currently for the concept or enough upside with the current stack of live pros.

3. The longevity of the online game to my knowledge has only been threatened by a semi-fascist government that to my recollect was VOTED in TWICE, not by me. I do not play on line but I have seen literally hundreds of P/L figures of online players and many of them look like high quality CTA type P/Ls, beaut little gentle upsloping equity curves...THAT is of definite interest.

4. I have traded computerized strategies in global markets for 17 years and was personally NEVER in favor of bots but I can assure you they are out there currently and growing in number but I did not know until now after several quality responses that they were not allowed...

A poker fund would actually ADD quality and quantity to the online game and additional pools of capital. YOU call us scum with no regard for online poker yet at the 1st sign of trouble in USA did Party-Poker-Gaming stay and use their vast capital to fight (taken from online rake from people like you.) NO they took that capital they had made in USA and disappeared back to Spiv-ville plus add in the other piss-weak undercapitalized sites that went under (Boyds and co) and the Neteller fiasco etc and there is clearly few in the indsutry that actually care about the PLAYER.

No we have real capital and real quality ideas and the reason to present them in this forum is to get responses that might allow us to grow a quality product that can then spawn ideas that benefit all of poker. I for one certainly do not need to scam or scum or anyone or need anyone's capital etc.

All the best

[Poker monkey]

You can't "ADD quality and quantity to the online game" while making money - poker players will have to be worse off, because you can't magic money out of nowhere.

Please use your capital to do something constructive. You can never make any economic profit with this lame idea.

[Chaoslord]

i am always a little suspicious about something like this.
a few things to consider:

why would any good winning player give up some of his profits? its the same as with staking, the really good players dont want to get staked.

why do you think some random 2/4 grinder (as said before you cant stake the really players) can jump into 10/20 games and be a winning player? tables are much more agressive and its gonna take a while (and a few buyins) to adapt, if they are even capable of winning at this level.

ive played you quite a bit on crypto and tbh i dont think you are very good and i cant imagine you beeing a winning player at 5/10 or higher so its probably hard for you to understand that all the busto guys are busto because a) they play bad b) they have bad tilt control or c) they have very bad bankroll management and often a combination of these. for my part i wouldnt want to stake someone like that

[GoldenBears]

Interesting concept, here is my opinion.

Your main problem is that anyone who is good enough to make money is already doing it on their own and doesn't need backing... I don't think that backing people in cash games is going to be efficient since the variance is relatively low.

You could back major players in tournaments (pay their entire buyin, take 60% of winnings) but the best targets for you are people who have the skill to have great EV in tournies but don't have the bankroll... meaning up and coming players and broke pros.

What about sportsbetting? You could further decrease volitilty by adding in a few sports bettors. The thing about sportsbetting is that it doesn't get any harder to win when you play for more money like poker does... your winning % is the same whether you are betting $1 on a game or $1m, and there is a very legitimate group of people who are pulling in great percentages but don't have the bankroll to fund themselves.

I've gone 161-90 over the last 2 years betting on College Football but since most pro bettors can only put down 1-2% of their bankroll on a game, I have been limited to betting $300-$600 per game. I would've gone 161-90 regardless of how much money I was laying down so it's unfortuante that my bankroll is only 30k.

I emailed my picks to my fraternity, and a lot of people shadowed my bets for much smaller stakes...

If you are going to put down 100m on professional gamblers, it wouldn't hurt to put like 10m of that towards sports cappers because it eliminates the problem of 'why would they play with my money if they are in fact already profitable themselves?' that you have with poker. I bet exclusively on CFB, but as far as I know I think the most profitable bettors are pro baseball cappers and NBA cappers.