I recently won a low-stakes tournament in Atlantic City. My wife's coworker (a Sicilian, ha ha!) heard about it and said that he would stake me for future tournaments. After considering this and reading a lot of online articles and blogs, I have not been able to see the reason for a player in my situation to get staked. I want to discuss staking where there's no makeup, as having a makeup seems an even worse deal.

Let's assume that there are available tournaments with all different levels of stakes. So let's say my choice is to either enter a $100 buy-in tournament only my own money or to sell 75% so that I enter a $400 buy-in tournament with $100 of my money and $300 of my staker's.

Let's `also assume that higher-stakes games attract better players, on average. (A couple of friends have tried to convince me that players at higher-stakes games simply draw players with more money. This is probably a subject for its own debate.) Also, I'm going to ignore travel expenses even though I don't live near a casino.

So it appears to me that all I would manage to do by being staked is to put myself into a game with better competition. In the unstaked case, I have risked $100 to win 100% of my prize of a $100 buy-in tournament. In the staked case, I have risked $100 to win 25% of my prize of a $400 buy-in tournament.

If one has the money for the buy-ins, why get staked? The only situation in which I can imagine the staking relationship making sense is the player is in his early 20s and hasn't had the time to accumulate the money to travel to a tournament and pay the buy-in.

-Jorocco