Results Update

I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is I'm down on my current running BAPs. The good news is I'm up on my completed BAPs.

My currently running BAPs have a ROI of -3%. I have $645 invested with a value of $625.66 out of 25 BAPs. All it will take is 1 or 2 of those BAPs to do well for me to get back in the postive. Another thing to note is these BAPs are not finished so I'm not too worried about these numbers.

My completed BAPs have a ROI of 22.94%. I invested $245 and recieved back $301.2o giving me a total profit of $56.20. I'm very pleased with these results.

I would have liked to have more BAPs completed, but it took me longer than I thought to get the money invested. Now that I have most of my money invested it will be easier to recycle it. My goal was to have a $200 profit by the end of May. It is looking like I may not reach this unless my BAPs start to complete quicker. I think what slowed this down was trying to get the money initially invested. I'm well ahead of my ROI goal and my recycle rate for invesments is on par. Overall I'm very pleased with my results. Thanks for reading.

Honor roll (Abigfish)

I would like to congratulate players who have done exceptionally well for me. So I thought I would create an honour roll for them. The first player I would like to congratulate is Abigfish. He turned a starting bankroll of $3,000 into $12,000 in 16 days. He was break even for most of the BAP until the 16th day where he took first place in the $55 50k guarantee on Pokerstars for $9,150.

The unfortunate thing is I had a measly $10 invested in him. I think I was getting low on my bankroll because I did not consider his plan high risk. I ended with $26.56 for a profit of $16.56 and a whopping 166% ROI. I invested $30 into his new BAP. Hopefully he will have similar results. So congratulations Abigfish for making the honour roll.

Why Poker Staking?

Why should you get involved in poker staking? This is a question I asked myself many times over my poker playing years. I honestly did not think I would get involved in staking. I thought, why should I give my money to someone else to split the profits when I could get one hundred percent of the profits for myself. Not to mention I did not like the thought of giving my money to someone I did not know. So why should you get involved in poker staking? Well read on and I'll show you why staking can be a lucrative investment that you should not be so quick to overlook it.

Online poker staking has grown in popularity in the last couple of years. You don't have to go far to understand how popular poker staking has become. Go to any poker site like twoplustwo.com, pocketfives.com just to name a few, and it will not be long before you can find posts about staking. Run a search in google for poker blogs and you will notice most of them will talk about some ongoing stakes they have. It seems to have become widely accepted in the online poker world. Why are so many players willing to give their money to people they have never met in person?

There are several reasons for this. First and foremost is a player's reputation is on the line when he is given money from another player. Thus it is in his best interest to treat that money as if it were his/her own. The great thing about online poker is you can't change your username in most poker rooms once created. This allows a person to keep track of a player's statistics. This brings us to the second reason why people are so willing to give money to strangers, which is poker staking sites. Sites like parttimepoker have a system setup allowing players to sell shares of their action to multiple persons or create a stake between two parties. On these staking sites a player is made to post his poker room usernames which cannot be changed. There are strict rules to be followed by the stakee. If the stakee breaks a rule he can be given gear, which is now seen by everyone. There are different types of gear that shows a person what rule you have broken. Gear can be permanent or temperary depending on the situation. In some cases banned gear can be given. This is usually done when a stakee does not return the money to the stakers. With all these deterents in place their is a strong incentive by players to follow the rules so they can continue to get staked. In essence what the poker staking sites have done is create an honor system that works well. This system was a big hurdle for me in getting involved in online poker staking.

Another reason why I got involved in poker staking is for the profit of course. As an investment poker staking can provide a better return then most traditional forms of investments. For instance stocks have a long term investment of about 10% annually. To put this into perspective, if you invest $1000 in various stocks that gives you a 10% annual return, it will take about 7 years to double that. That works out to be a return of $143 a year. With the reality of todays stock market you would be very lucky to find a 10% annual return. To compare with poker staking, your annual ROI could be much higher. I read a thread on parttimepoker discussing annual return versus monthly return. The average monthly ROI of the OP in this thread is about 8%, which works out to be about a 92% ROI annually. If you look through more threads you will notice this number is not uncommon, if you are choosing your investments wisely. Not only does poker staking have a better ROI, it is easier to research your investments. When buying stocks in a company you can find information on them that the company provides. As we all know they like to tailor their information to inflate their value. When investing in a player you can find out every game he has played as well as his ROI. You can also ask questions to players and watch their games. You can't watch companies at work unless you are Warren Buffett who can afford to fly there. As you can see this was one of the main reasons I was drawn to poker staking.

Another reason to get involved in poker staking is to invest idle money. Depending on the game you are playing you are only playing a certain percentage of your money at any given time. Even players who multitable more than 16 tables can only have a certain percentage of their money in play. If you have 60% of your money just sitting there idle, why not have someone grow it for you. As of this moment I have about 80% of my bankroll invested which does not leave me much to play poker with. But I could always get staked and use my bankroll for staking others. I think this is a better use of my time and money. It is a good feeling knowing you dont have to grind to grow your bankroll. Allowing others to play with your money will allow you to buy into more games than you would if you were only playing with your money, which brings me to my final point.

Your worst enemy in poker is variance. As you know poker is a game for the long run. The more games or hands you play the more skill will take effect. If you look at a graph of a good player with 100 games played you will see many bumps in that graph. If you look at a graph of a good player with 10,000 games you will see an almost perfectly straight positive line. Poker staking allows you to get involved in more games at once, thus allowing you to reduce the luck factor providing you choose your investments correctly.

As you can see there are many reasons to get involved in poker staking. Poker staking has become mainstream in the online poker world thanks to online poker staking sites creating a system of trust among players. Thus poker staking has become more common and in my opinion has made poker more profitable overall. So if you are new to poker staking please feel free to post any questions or comments you have. For those of you who are already involved in poker staking on a small scale I encourage you to stake more and stake more often. Thank you for reading.

Poker staking (Bankroll status)

Well I'm getting close to having 80% of my bankroll staked out. I was having trouble finding some low risk BAPs. I created a thread on PTP discussing the current trends in BAPs. I was noticing more high risk BAPs than low risk BAPs. Low and behold shortly after I was able to find some good low risk BAPs. Since my bankroll is getting close to being staked out to where I want it, this will slow down on the amount of BAPs' I will be investing in. As a result I will be a bit more picky in what BAP's I will choose.

Currently I am down from my original bankroll. I don't have specific data yet. Unfortunately, I am having a few issues with my data, which I'm ironing out. Once that is fixed I will be posting my bankroll results in more detail.

I'm not too worried about a slow start. The thing I have to realise is this still involves poker. As you all may have experienced, poker is a game of variance. I'm confident my investments are sound. One thing I have been doing that has improved my skill in choosing BAPs is viewing posts by players who are having trouble selling their BAPs. I review their BAP and give them an honest opinion from an investors point of view. Sometimes I find a good BAP to invest in. It's little things like this I believe will improve my ROI over time. By the way if you ever want an honest opinion on a BAP you are trying to sell, then feel free to post it here in the comments. You can post the link here or break it down in point form. I will be only too happy to help you improve your BAP. Thanks for reading.