1. what numbers do you want?

2. we broke around even this WSOP. had 50% of a guy on a make-up deal and he got like 30th.

3. ~300k

4. live poker pro

5. hard to really pick one story. i always kind of laughed about sending strangers on the internet thousands of dollars all the time and them being down like 200k+ and never have met them in real life. (still havent met 80% of the people i ever staked)

99% sure i posted about it before (might even be in the "most make-up/how long" thread.

basically g zee's was stack farming and tokyo was one of those accounts he used. g zee's then told elio and I that tokyo was a good kid and that we should stake him. we got a HH, and elio and I are convinced it was g zee's playing and not actually micheal le (tokyo09 account holder).

i had people tell me they grinded up there at g zees house and can confirm this happened (not specifically it being tokyo, but that the stack farming happened). griffin was there too.

What are your thoughts about online ghosting?

Did you/elio got ever involved in final stages of any horse mtt?

What do you think about today biggest stables that force horses to let the coaches/owner finish the mtt?

How do you think ghosting affects the ecosystem of online poker and stables ROIs?

Why do you think major sites know everything about ghosting but dont care much about it in terms of preventing it in many way?

Thanks for doing this.

when me and pageh656 started, we were like 1 of the 3 threads in the MP. the sngs were so insanely soft. we made a lot off of like 10 abi sng grinders. obviously the games get tougher and tougher, and that is part of the reason i got out. its also hard to run everything from the states and i got pretty tired of living abroad. also the daily wear and tear of playing"bad cop" just got to me. i was constantly dealing with scumbags who stole from us, having to deal with them blah blah blah

i also got out because i got into a really good group of gamblers around my home town and could make a lot more money here and it be "stress free" in a lot of regards.

gotta go for a bit, but keep posting and will catch up tonight/tomorrow

1. You still receive players?
2. What is the player who star from micro and play more higher now, What he improve to for this?
3. How your stable take when pple is in MU and need to pay bills and lifes thing , how your stable handle this?

Thanks!

Hey long time.

This is an exceptionally crystal ball gazing question but how differently do you think your staking operation would have gone had April 2011 not happened..

I guess what i mean was do you think black Friday (apart from the somewhat irreparable loss of liquidity) changed the "plan" or "direction" that you intended to go with staking or do you think you still accomplished all of the markers that you intended to do.

J

how many people have scammed/stolen from you?

how complicated are all the tax issues with staking? do you just feed all the info to an accountant?

what are your thoughts on markup and shorting people?

do you always just back people for 100% or do you sometimes just buy one time pieces?

who got the best staking deal and what was it, or is it just always 50/50?

what was the biggest improvement you had ina horse? like did you back someone for mid stakes MTTs who turned into a complete crusher?

Hey. Thanks for doing this.

Why exactly did you decide to do this well now?

How do you feel about staking/buying pieces in general now? Both you doing it yourself and the process and the marketplace here?
It seems to me that with all the scumbags and scammers that you've encountered and worked with, and by reading some of your posts over the last while, you look on it all quite a bit less favourably than you used to. Is that fair/accurate?

Do you play online from the US at all? The sites aren't pretty software wise but the players at low-mid stakes are pretty abysmal. Plus, traffic is increasing at a pretty quick rate across most sites.

Do you think opening a post-black friday stable is a terrible idea? Is it more important to find great players to stake or just find really soft games?

Hi Zima...glad to see you're still trucking along.

If you could do staking all over again what would you do differently?

What was the worst part of your staking career?

Do you prefer sweating a horse on his way to binking $40k or waking up to a text/IM that the horse just binked $40k without even really being aware he was deep or even playing that day?

Can I play in that PLO game once or twice if I promise to pound Jack and Diets like I did back in the day? Does Flicka(sp?) ever play in that game?

what do you think of the idea of investing in people, rather than talent?

1.Tell us your "favorite" scammer story. Remember you made a thread few years back about that stuff.

2. How do you decide when to draw the line on staking somebody? How do you know for certain this is when you must drop the horse? How do you handle that emotionally and mentally to let go of all that mu money?

nice thread so far tyty

who is the biggest scumbag in poker that is still playing iyo?

what did u find more profitable, staking mtters or sngers?

best of luck in the new ventures sir

I don't know which numbers you can tell. There are many interesting numbers and statistics.

What's your staking ROI online? live?

Total players staked?

% of profitable deals?

% of scammers?

Did your yearly profits steadily increased over years?

Best year, how much?

Worst year, how much?

Most MU cleared? How long?

Any success stories? How many guys went to play on their own?

Thank you

Optimal strategy to collect money owed from horses that scammed you?

Do you feel live MTTs are now less profitable than online? Do you factor in travel expenses?

Have you ever hired goons to intimidate/collect from shady horses?

How old are you?
how often do horses who scammed/stole/similar end up repaying way later (can you give some examples of this)
do you contact regularly ppl who owe you etc from the past etc

will think of better questions later thx for doing it!

When you were recruiting players for your stable, what were some of the things you were looking/were off putting? At what point in mu do you decide this guy sucks and sell his mu or cut him off?

1. Its such a hard rule to enforce. it sucks for people who are "playing it straight" or whatever. I would be lying if elio and i didnt talk about just having elio sit around and play final tables all day, but we never did that. I know/have heard of stables doing that though. me and elio would have all the money if we did that i assume.

2. I never did. from what i know, elio didnt either. i assume elio was sweating some of the tables, but we never actively ghosted our guys on a wide scale. elio always said he would feel too bad if he made a play that busted a horse from a mtt (however weird that sounds). but yeah.

3. they are doing what they think is best for them. it sucks for the stables/players that play it "straight". i know a stable that had 4-8 horses, and 4 investors, and each time a horse made a final table one of the investors ghosted. like, they were on skype and the backers made every single decision.

4. if elio ghosted every horse in big spots our stable would have been a lot more successful and i would probably stll be more involved/we would have way more guys still.

5. its way to hard to police and prove for the sites to really care i think.


1. no.

2. i cant really remember anyone who made that jump from micro to high stakes.

3. we usually give people cashouts while in make up. its a loan and must be paid back either way though (if they dont clear MU or we drop them for whatever reason)

Hey man, hope all is well.

Its really hard to say. so many things would have changed. in a way, BF was good cause i moved to mexico and didnt have **** to do so i just did staking stuff a lot of the time. in the states, i would have had more of a social life outside of staking. but, the games were so good that would have far outweighed any of the "extra time" i would have put it. if BF didnt happen, i would assume me and elio would have made a lot more from staking.

its really hard to say if BF changed stuff too much though.

1. its tough to say. i assume there is a past horse reading this some where in mom's basement and they stole from elio and I, and we didnt catch them...but, gonna just throw out some guesses in terms of that. i am guessing i have staked around 600-700 dif players, while about 50 of them "stole" in some form or another.

2. the mere word of "taxes" makes my skin crawl. i am scared of the IRS so dont really want to get into any questions regarding this. but yeah, a tax professional is a good idea.

3. elio was buying pieces on his own for a while in the hi rollers. our staking operation generally just had 100% of our horses and didnt buy 1 off pieces of people. its a hard market and we didnt really have anymore need for action since we always had so many horses. i personally do some piece buying now, but its more of friends.

4. think we had one guy who was 60/40 for mtts. he played a ton of euro sites, played a pretty small avg buyin (maybe 40-50) and played an insane amount of volume. he also didnt start at that, but over the years got that from hard work and being a great horse all around.

5. i just looked over our list, and i cant really pinpoint anyone who turned into a complete crusher. i am probably missing someone (few guys), but yeah.

I decided to do it now because some people have mentioned it off and on for a while, and one night i was drunk and dealing with scammers/past horses and i thought it would be a good idea to promise in some thread to do a well. and here we are.

Its a very very hard business to do well in and "make it" over the years. the MP here is pretty much trash. all the good buys are happening between friends (rich friend has poor friend ask him to buy action) having said that, a lot of "rich friends" light it on fire when buying action of other friends. its a really fine line that not very many people are good at walking.

i will admit that staking and dealing with the people i had to deal with pretty much broke me mentally. not fun to admit that, but it did. i was the bad cop. elio didnt have to deal with much of the hate/telling people no/deal with the scammers who would run you in circles and never intend to pay. its basically why i had to take a step back. there are some instances of living with horses who ended up stealing a ton of money. at one point i was living full time in a house with horses who had MU totaling over 1m, ha ha. waking up to see them grinding every day and doing numerous things wrong just takes a toll on you. i cant imagine what people were doing without me there. i could go on about the mental aspect of staking, but its not pretty, ha ha



i play 0 online poker. every time i sit down to play online poker i would rather be any where else.

the games are the key. a good winning stable is possible, but its a lot of work.

hey. sup
i am gonna touch on it in a later post (lipos question), but trying to get a better feel for peoples character/work ethic is much more important than whether they have the skills to beat high stakes. it was a vastly underestimated part of staking that elio and i didnt learn about for a long long time, and its not fun to figure it out when a horse is 100-200k deep.

just the mental drain it takes on you. most of my life was very negative for years which sucked. i had good things happening in my life personally, but every time i had to open my laptop it was dealing with people stealing from us, how to recover that money, what we could do to prevent it. also, it just hurts when your "friends" steal from you. a lot of the horses who stole from elio and i, i talked to on a daily basis.

these days i dont really care either way. i can vividly remember watching a horse win the first 180 man sng when pageh656 and i had the stable, and i thought we were gonna be rich. now i most likely wouldnt even sweat a horse at the final table of the million. i am just too numb to it now. i guess a major live win i would sweat? but not even sure if thats the case tbh.

lol, i dont control who gets in. and flicker never plays that game. he is too busted/no one liked him.

If it is one person I do not miss in the south florida scene it is Flicker. Hes the reason I started wearing headphones at the table.

right when i was leaving mexico about 3 years back, a new deal I was seeing pop up a lot among mexico mtt grinders went as follows:

play x number of tournaments where x is something like 500 or 1000 (usually a few weeks worth idk), horse gets a smaller % (usually around 20-30) and after the term ends, profit is divvied and if the horse is in makeup then the makeup is erased.

this sounded genius to me at the time, and through casual observation in the years since it doesn't seem like that ever really caught on as much as I thought it would.

has this kind of deal ever been appealing to you as a backer? did you ever look at different backing structures that avoided potential makeup slavery?

Did u ever make a list of all ppl who scammed you?