let me preface this by giving a little background before going on a long winded rant:
I have sold action for ftops/wcoop/wsop and random live events. I have also had a fair amount of success in some and have paid out mid 5 figures in profits to investors here. I don't play tournies that much, i'm mainly grind mid stakes 6max where i do pretty well for myself, but i don't have very good mtt results over small samples of high stakes mtts. However, i can honestly say that A. I do make sure I think i have a decent edge in everything i play before i play it (earlier this scoop i decided to sit out a couple of events that didn't look like great value even though i sold shares) and B. despite sometimes my markup > overall roi according to opr or whatever, i can say with confidence that i have never sold action in any event that i didn't think was a +ev investment for investors.
On the flip side a do buy a lot of action on these forums and my intent is to make money, not really to gamble. I do do a decent amount of research, pay attention to trends and look for good spots. Sometimes i got months without buying any action, sometimes i buy like 5-10k worth of action in a week.
As a result, i do believe there are people that are committing something close to straight up fraud in some of their threads, and they usually follow a certain trend, and i know many of these topics have been touched on itt:
1. unjustified markup: I see this all the time, a low to midstakes mtt grinder that has x% roi in mtts with on average buy in of $y over a large sample charges x% markup on an mtt or a series of mtts that is 5*$y. The assumption is that if i am winning at 30% roi at 26 dollar tournaments, i should have the same roi over an FTOPs series with the average buy in being $200+. I think this is especially important since a lot of the structures of these events play much deeper than your average 26 dollar tourneys and a lot of people are pretty clueless on how to play deep stack poker because they have very little experience.
2. Selling very large % of themselves This is especially troubling if they are selling something at high markup (i.e. if someone is selling 70%+ of themselves at 30% markup warning bells should be going off in your head). Obviously this is different for live mtts and wsop for various reasons, but there is almost no way to justify charging that much markup (assuming you are even attempting to make this investment profitable for buyers) and selling that much action. In reality, if your ROI is that big, there is no reason for you to be selling that much action, and you should want to keep as much of your action as you can. In fact, I am almost positive that anyone that is selling action like this is looking to freeroll a decent amount of equity assuming they are somewhat neutral ev vs. some fields which makes investments obviously -ev for backers.
3. Selling a large number of very small pieces. I think its pretty clear that the people that are putting large amounts of money buying shares into the 2p2 marketplace are doing quite a bit more homework on their investments than your random casual 2p2 lurker type with a couple hundo in online poker accounts doing nothing. Therefore, people that buy smaller pieces are easily going to be a lot more gullible than those buying bigger pieces. These threads are so easy to spot, lets say 2 people are selling 2.5k worth of action, the one that with a bit of research can be seen as +ev will be sold out fairly quicky with notable investors taking $250+ shares, the one that is a boarderline scam will take a bit longer to sell out, usually by 30 or more people taking $50 worth of action. Usually these people will be less familiar with the ins and outs of investing in poker, lurk less in marketplace, post less on 2p2, etc.
I recently called out tourbound for making an absurd thread here that fit every single characteristic i have noticed and listed above:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/16...k-ftop-754096/
anyways, i don't really want to get into a discussion about this exact staking thread, but I attempted to point out some basic signs that pointed to how this was a terrible investment, and mods deleted most of my comments and i was labeled as a troll by the very people that may be making a terrible investment without further consideration.
I realized the problem then and there:
I honestly don't care that much about people who are uninformed who don't know what they are doing with their money, but its another thing to actively facilitate a culture where these people can be easily scammed out of their money and not realize it. I think the main question is if there should be a system to protect investors who are unable to make rational decisions in the 2p2 marketplace?
Its a tough spot tbh, i'm not sure what active measures can come from this discussion.