I buy into a cash game for $500. I sell 10% of my action to a friend for $50. I get down to $300 and decide to buy in for another $200, bringing my stack back up to $500. My friend doesn't want 10% of the additional $200. If I cash out for $1,000, how much do I owe my friend?

This is a straight-forward calculation with percents.

He owns 10% of the original $500 (which is $50). When you're down to $300, he owns 10% of that (which is $30). You buy back to $500, but he's still only in for $30. So he's now vested at 6%. You cash out for $1000, and 6% of that is his.

What was the lowest point you found yourself after depositing the extra 200?
(what if it was 195 for example?)

How does that matter? I think Aaron's analysis is right.

Keep it simple. The mix of the money makes all other evaluations subjective, both parts thinking they should get more. "I/You played more with my/your money". Unsolvable. Only the reasonable math solution will do.

Aaron's analysis is good.

OP, did your friend ask for 50/700 (7.14%)?

It still depends how it happened. If you dont know that and you have no other information i am ok with 6% at first glance. But its not that simple in reality.

Imagine this for example;

Just after reaching 300 and depositing 200 you get AA vs KK that some 300 player goes all in and you call. You win it and jump to 300+500=800. You play a few hands that the eff stack you use never gets more than 30-40, basically doing nothing up and down and after a while you are near same level 800 again and then at some point another all in with another guy that has AKs and you have KK and its for 200 effective now and you reach 1000.

Cant your friend basically come and tell you, listen, your 200 that you deposited would not have changed anything in what happened. Inevitable all ins anyway. You never actually used that 200 because your effective stacks was <=300 in all those plays. So i deserve still 10% of the move to 800 which is 80.

Wouldn't your friend be in principle correct if it happened that way?


Now what if you instead went all the way to 200 because in the very next hand after depositing 200 you went all in with AA again but you lost now bad beat vs KK for 300 and went to 200. How much stake in what comes next does your friend have? Did you use your 200 in anything? Not yet! Your position would have been 0 if you didn't use it now and you would be bust and could leave and friend would get 0. In that case if you then went from 200 to 1000 in some good run streak your friend gets 0 right using the extended 6% equivalent argument logic that starts you from 200 in terms of the first time your 200 actually made a difference where he had 10% on 0, right?

Those are extreme examples of course to make the point.


So asking how it happened is relevant. If you do not have it then a simulation can happen if you have typical sd and winrates for that game. Why simulation? Because in principle if the game was say a 2-5 game you have different wirnates as 100bb vs 60bb stack so your deposit of eg 40bb=200 made a difference in how easily you recovered and we need to know on average what is the effect of that extra boost (as a conditional to reach 1000 and exit). You might have for example had some fold equity in some spot that forced a guy out of a pot in your nut flush draw semibluff that would not have worked if you hadnt deposited that extra 200.

So yes it does affect your performance that you have that extra 200 in a non trivial manner in general.

Since those things are hard to evaluate without further information i do not see a problem with 6% but its correct to ask yourself what happened really also. Because you may honestly owe your friend more if you never for example used that 200 depending on how you actually got to 1000 or it might have played a massive difference also either directly or as fold /intimidation equity.



Ps:You can make the discussion even more complicated by introducing butterfly effect type arguments like how your action to ask another 200 in chips changed the very kind of card deals sequence that took place next etc but lets say we eliminate such complications by having a fixed always same sequence of hands dealt regardless. You could then argue that the height of your chips affected again how others played out of positions eg their mood or whatever etc lol. It gets nasty complicated really. We can relax all those "free will" chaos type effects out of the discussion for now to make sense of it focusing on the important main effects if these details are not known or in that sense its very hard to argue properly anyway and it all becomes a philosophical question lol.

I would go with 7%. Unless he had the option to cash out his $30, it is unfair to dilute him more than that.

Are you just trolling us here? Staking doesn't work that way.

dear lord

No.

I agree with that. Especially between friends, no need to squabble over 10 bucks on a winning day.

Edit to add: The right time to agree on the right cut is before you rebuy, of course, not after you cash out.

Using masque's reasoning, you could turn your 500 into 50,000 and your friend gets nothing if you never "needed" his 50 at any point. Solid work.

Ctyri bs as usual and keep piling the hatred further. I agree that between friends other things are more important though than nitty details but lets ignore that for now for the thread's sake, otherwise why the f is the thread in SMP if not to give us a chance to learn something about these matters.

No this is not the same the way you mocked it. The purchase of 10% puts the friend in the 10% ownership of whatever the initial 500 can do. Its a company. Until you specify this ends and you better specify by the way or he gets 10% of anything you did indefinitely with that money undiluted with other things. The friend isnt giving you 50 to your 450 under the agreement i only get paid if you use all 500 in some play or anything over 450 or something like that. Its like shares in a company.

But once you add that 200 the initial 300 and 200 are now 2 companies and it is entirely possible depending in how it happened that the second company never made any difference to the success of the original or that the original was destroyed if it happened as described in example i gave and that second company is all that recovered the system.

An alternative approach is to avoid all this and do the right thing which is the moment you add 200 you evaluate the stake of your friend in the new company that just formed if you want to see this as a single company with different share adjustment. This is the best thing.

We can do that new valuation based on what your plan is in this company ie plan to play for 6 h or 500 hands or until you bust or reach 1000 whichever first and you better believe it it will depend on what kind of player you are and winrates/sd of the game etc. Its like that 200 affects the risk of ruin of the initial investment etc.


It is precisely because you never did that proper valuation transition ie a new contract redrawn at the moment you brought 200 in, that the system is not a new company but 2 of them in parallel working and my argument makes sense that how it happened can either entangle these 2 companies or not at all (eg effective stack or intimidation fold equity size etc).

So take your dear lord and other mocking statements guys and shove them because clearly you guys do not appreciate the complexity of the world we live in and the richness of its structure. Sometimes you need indeed some analysis and examples to see what is necessary here to do it right and why you should have created a new agreement at the deposit point.

If you had a coin flip equivalent game of say 51-49 coin at 20$ per bet you have different valuation at 500 and 10% vs down to 300 and 200 added than if you had a 52-48 coin at 5$ bets and the same happened. In the second case the addition of 200 does absolutely nothing to the progress of the 300 to 800 eventually (risk of ruin is not impacted really its tiny anyway). So the stake is still 10% of 800 in that model.

Poker is different in the sense that you may use all your stack at some points or it has an intimidation role but we are not even told how it worked here (ie how it happened if it was all one session all the money at the table or a mini bankroll etc). We really need to know what was the bb level in that game because if you were say 500bb deep and went to 300bb and never faced any action that the stack size mattered then its different vs a case it did make a difference (eg some all in fold equity etc).

Again none of this matters if you do it right. You juswt evaluate a share before and after at the new deposit. But it was not done right here. That is the point.

In this case we are not even told what the bb level the player is playing is. It could be 5000bb or 500bb or 100bb starting stack who knows. So more details are needed to see how relevant that 200 is to the progress.

See it that way too, if you have a company that works just fine you cant just have anyone jump in and get a stake at your profits if their money never makes any difference anywhere. What the f?

If you play a shares game you need to use proper valuation arguments. Then yes they can share in the profits at the end and the process details (path) are irrelevant.

But the addition of external funds into a system that doesnt use it in anything isnt altering its progress in a way that deserves reward. If it does affect it, it matters though.

These things need to be specified in advance. If not use the 6% argument or something similar but know that the details do matter in reality since you didnt redraw a contract.

Oh waaaaah.

Notice how your entire post can be reduced to just three sentences? Aspire for that. The creation of pointless complexity does not make your posting any better.

I'm glad you agree with the conclusion that was reached in Post #4.

You're becoming (became?) unhinged.

Ramble and scream all you want, here's your own words describing how you think staking works with virtual piles of chips that can be treated differently.
We're not forcing you to write and defend this crap, you've decided to take on that role yourself.

This is actually a good point. OP apparently bought in with the additional $200 without asking his staker before buying in and not expressively giving him the possibility to get his $30. Mixing in more money changes the situation a bit. So OP can be seen as having to pay some kind of a "fine" for not communicating entirely properly with his staker. Those 1(+)% could be seen as that "fine", also fits some logic about how people apparently count (ctyri, how did you get the 50/700, 7.14%?)

Guys, I think you should leave masque alone, this is not helping. Poker has a lot of super experts on this site, for natural reasons, and he's not quite able to identify he's not one of them. So what he says about poker you may use in some other contexts, even if not in the actual game of poker.

It was a live $2/5 NL game. Let's discuss Aaron's method vs giving my friend 50/700 (7.14%) of profit.

Since you were in 100bb type game the merging of stacks is very clear and the dilution you introduced was both necessary to continue to play properly stacked and was accompanied by a rejection of your friend to participate.

Now the fact it was 100bb initially and at reset is important because it makes less likely in general that there was no impact of the deposit on the final outcome. (see what i mean if you were eg 300 bb vs 200bb it might be seen as not necessary yet etc but now it was)

It is important that your friend was offered the chance to participate and rejected. So he was aware of the deposit. He should have asked for a new redrawing of agreement or you should have offered but at least its known at the time.

In general you should therefore ask yourself what would have happened if he had accepted a new contract at that point in order to accommodate the new deposit.

You likely would have agreed given the small size of the overall stack that the deposit is of immediate impact and the correct way to value the new share is indeed close to 10%*300+0%*200=6%*500.

So he has 6% of the new "company".

60$ is therefore correct if a redrawing would have happened.

It is not reasonable to accept otherwise unless the friend initially had told you that you play until you bust or go to 1000 or whatever you had agreed to as exit target/timeframe and there was no stipulation for keeping it at 100bb. If there was such statement then the friend might have expected you go all the way to 0 before restarting and he has a claim if indeed the recovery never used the full stack above 300 on the way up. This is hard to know because you need also your friend to have watched how it happened.

But its kind of an easy argument to make now that indeed your 200 made a difference in at least making your stack healthier which impacts play even if the chips are not used (fold equity, set mining etc).


So look back on how it happened and explain your friend that it was necessary to deposit and he would have been given a new share of the new refinanced "company" that makes sense to be what his participation in equity was at the moment of the refinancing. Your friend has a case only if you had talked to each other initially and had agreed that you play until you bust or reach a target and you never allowed yourself to bust. But your friend should have complained then in that case too unless all these things happened while he was away etc.

So answer these details also;

1) What was the agreement? He has 10% on final position until when? Double or bust? 6hours , 500 hands , you know what i mean? Had he told you not to add more money and go all the way to 0 if needed?

2) Was he actually around to say no to the 10% on the additional 200? How did that happen? Was he watching the game? Does he have a case that your extra 200 was never used on the way to 1000? Hard to accept as this is a small 100bb stack now and it matters typically.

3) Can you prove that you added 200? (i assume yes using your description of rejection but we still need some clarity on how the rejection of a new 10% came).

Thats because i am not answering here in terms of how staking typically happens but how it should happen depending on what people have agreed with initially. I never claimed i was an expert on poker staking deals or standard procedure or answering as such. I am not. This a free thinking forum that people propose questions and others answer based on several arguments of merit that have mathematical or logical/ethical foundation. For example a legitimate problem exists if one makes an agreement to play until they double or bust and then proceed to add more funds to it or they play deep stacked in a table so that the extra stack is never used.

Also if the initial stake was in some 5 buy in worth position (had it been say a 0.5-1 game), dropping to 300 is still allowing 3 buy ins and they do not need to be all at the table or if they are they may not be at risk really depending on the stacks of others. Maybe you play in a game that the others have stacks that are always less than 300. See what i mean? Then in that case the friend has a case to make for getting more back. 300 here is 60bb so this is unlikely. But we didn't know the bb level then when i answered .

Those issues all stem from the fact the right thing wasnt done. When the right thing isnt done legal/logical math arguments can enter the discussion in terms of ethics, expectations etc.

People can ridicule what i say all they want here, but this is SMP , its not general poker discussion on staking. Otherwise post in other forums for that purpose. A side issue of importance is always correct to argue.

Some tables are very deep for example and one may be playing 500bb deep (not the case here as OP explained which is exactly why my post was needed to clarify that detail) reaching 300bb and then the additional 200 doesnt do anything really unless others are similarly deep.

Here it likely did matter because it was only 100bb. Its hard to avoid seeing the deposit as creating a new company. In general the answer is it depends on the details and a new agreement must be always made to avoid all these complications.

If you played very deep with 300 effective at all times and you made a new deposit the friend can have a right to not only reject the new deposit participation but also to insist on a full 10% (unless fold equity mattered at some future spot). When i made my posts those details were not known.

In this forum lately its a liability when you allow yourself to think in a broader sense. Its a sign of decay of the state of tolerance of free thinking in 2+2 to have people gang up on others for offering a variety of different points of views that can be easily argued away with more details and better arguments rather than insults if they have no merit.

Well, you cashed out for $1000 and he has a 6% stake, so you owe him $60. In the future, you should work this sort of thing out ahead of time. If he's really insistent on 7%, then just ship him an extra $10, cuz it's not really worth getting into an argument over it.

This is the most sensible thing to do. You should think through the various contingencies and work out the parameters of this sort of thing up front. Aside from talking about buying in for more (either do it up to a certain amount, or don't do it at all) and stop-wins.

Coherent post. Found about three points I'd wish to address later.

The intolerance is not for "free thinking" it's for "rambling posts that don't make reasonable points."

Change your posting style and you'll have fewer criticisms of your posting style. Continue posting long, rambling posts that make unclear points on weak and uninformed assumptions, and you'll continue to feel marginalized.

If you post more succinctly and more clearly, you'll get better responses.

Oh yeah this is what is stopping you from seeing the truth in my statements, the length of the posts that are only long eg here because they offer many arguments and cover many cases. I say its rather the idea you have about me that is prejudiced and thinks little of my capacity to imagine broader situations of merit in the absence of complete information.

In other words if the guy was playing at 500bb (who until OP clarified the bb level it was not known) or 300bb (because i dont know he likes to play super deep who knows) and others were at 100bb-150bb or less at that table and there was a deposit as soon as he went down to 200bb and staking guy rejected participating and then the rest of the game never used effective stacks over 200bb, then the staking guy couldn't have in the absence of a proper new contract the very moment of the deposit, an argument that he deserved still 10% of the profits? Why not? What did the extra 200 do in this case in the absence of a contract?

It is the responsibility of our OP here to force the contract or disclose what the initial agreement was (regarding eg where to keep the minimum of the stack). Maybe the initial agreement was that you play until you bust or double up. If that was the case then a deposit violates that agreement and in that sense if what i then described takes place regarding effective stacks the staker deserves to argue for 10% rare as this sequence may be in general.

Until an agreement is made (at the new deposit level) as is the proper thing and until we know the initial agreement details between the 2 (play till double or bust or 6 hour or whatever term) there ought to be some hesitation for offering opinion. Thats all. Nothing wrong at all with you offering a suggestion and nothing wrong with me accepting it generally and still wanting to know more because i saw various extreme possibilities too in the absence of further information.

To enhance that reasoning for the hesitation i offered extreme examples. Thats all that happened. And then i was ridiculed about it as if after many years trading the market i still needed to be told what shares in a company are lol.

You also saw me in many points to agree with the 6% if an agreement were to be redrawn and to also instantly endorse it further when it was revealed that the bb level was $5 making his stack only 60bb then hence legitimizing the other 40bb deposit typically (well unless he was in a short handed table vs 1 or 2 opponents below 60bb or whatever and it never became higher for them).


The moment there is a deposit and still no agreement with the other guy it is as if we are playing for 2 companies. These 2 if the stacks were big could avoid coupling for real for a few moves/hands if the others were all below the eg 300 level. Eventually however and certainly here that he had only 60bb at the moment of the deposit, the new deposit will make a difference and a merging of 2 companies to 1 and a forced new agreement is inevitable by reality itself. We have complications otherwise. But until that merging is forced by the reality of the game and until the people do not have an agreement in place or we do not know the initial agreement they have in all its details, we do not have the right to gang up on others that try to show some inherent complexity in the situation that can alter results from 6% in the eyes of a truly ethical human.

I shouldn't be treated as someone that doesn't recognize that the proper thing to do if funds are added is to redefine the sharing %. But we were missing that agreement and the details that legitimize the argument came after my posts and maybe because of them.