awesome idea/wp attempting to pull it off

Sounds to me like a few poker players smoked a little weed and had some great ideas.

Do marketplace threads include results?

It'd be kinda cool, and one rough way of evaluating things, to try to work out whether, if you invested in _everything_ offered there, whether you'd be making money.

Lol good luck trying to collect brah

Awesome concept. Is there a minimum amount you are allowed to buy?

People who know Timex would, I suspect, widely agree that he's not the kind of person who would commit to any obligation he couldn't meet.

I'd prefer Mike's credit than Random McGrinder who's just scored big.

No, the problem isn't a securities regulations. There are no securities involved. The issue is gambling regulations (+wire act etc). The authorities are not interested in random players taking some buyins from friends etc at a markup. But when its industrialised it turns into a business and they would start to get very interested.

The same issues exist with this activity.

Sorry these ideas didn't work out Timex. Both showed real innovation as well as being highly profitable (would have loved to be on your end of some of that action!)

Haha well if I ever workout the legality and Phil Ivey is looking to book 500% of himself in the main event, you'll be the first person I call

whats the sunday mio bet?

btw, you're wasted on poker. Head to Wall Street!

Timex couldn't you just get someone outside of the US book your bets but bankroll the entire thing? I don't know what the regulations are like in the UK but its relatively lenient here in regards to gambling

^^ No good if still taking bets from US. Also, even in UK to UK punters, if it were deemed to be a "business" then lots of issues open up (including tax and regulation).

Sure; none of these comments were intended as indictments of his integrity. I don't know the guy, so that would be way out of line.

But if it becomes common to be able to short players, or if a group of players got together to set up another bank to short players and were raking in money at a decent clip, there's no telling what could happen. I mean hell, everyone assumed FTP could pay out, too...

Setting standards and establishing safeguards, procedures, and etiquette up front protects the community from scams and scandals down the road, even if Timex is the most trustworthy and upstanding guy ever during this whole process.

Agree with those who say that he likely has a securities and/or internet gaming issue, depending on where he does business and where he's domiciled.

The risk of ruin on running something like this is pretty large, even only taking 20% or less of tournaments like the main. Add in the fact that people can chip dump, make deals at final tables without alerting you, etc, and it has to be a losing proposition. When you have an extra 20-50% of yourself, you can offer people first place money to dump it to you, and when the play looks funny at the end, what recourse does the banker have? "I don't want to pay because your HU opponent kept raise-folding" will probably get you in hot water in many ways. Not to mention the numerous regulatory/IRS related approvals. If you can take 200%+ of yourself in something, or more, then you can just buyin to other tournaments, take the chips off the table, and put them on in your added event. I think you would have gotten crushed by some unscrupulous players.

whys he shut down?

Does the currency make any impact at all on the legality of this?

Does it matter if wagers are made in USD, EUR, GBP, Corn husks, Rum bottles or cigarettes?

Probably a number of reasons, but one of the biggest being that doing what he was attempting to do runs into a lot of sticky legal issues wrt gambling and investing regulations and he didn't want to deal with the hastles of dealing in such a grey/black market.

No, all of these have a cash equivalent in dollars. Funds do such accounting all the time so that investors don't get paid in cattle or wheat.

RIP BoT

Can we assume you were more naive about the politics than the legality of this? You must be aware that Negreanu's Fantasy Draft has been held in the open for years.

I'm not sure what you are asking but the Fantasy Draft raises far fewer legal, regulatory, and risk issues than an ongoing business involving sophisticated and opaque (quasi-) securities.

This is a fantastic idea and will help keep markup prices accurate. Crazy that it has taken this long for there to be two sides of the market.

Hey Timex if you ever figure all this out you should start your own gambling website. With the amount of action you were getting on the sunday million and the amount of action you would get on this you could start a nice small gambling company.

great idea. i think the problem lies with the fact the for the actual idea to work on a larger scale it couldn't just be timex doing it, there would have to be other potentially less reputable people doing it aswell.

i think there could be potential problems with collusion. poker is a game where you can lose on purpose. So, i think it would be possible for 2 friends to work together in a couple of ways. firstly, they could sell of a ton of action and then bust of purpose. as i understand it, the person, playing the role of timex, would then pocket the investments (if this is flawed, someone tell me).

also it could actually be used to keep MU high kinda like bartering. So the person selling shares starts at a really high price. a friend of them then offers what they claim is a reasonable price. then the seller can undercut them slightly and appear to be selling cheaply or just not actually coz they're working with the other person anyway

Hmmm given the volatility of tournament poker, IF he was still running his "bank" (which he's apparently not) I'd expect the market to clear about 100,000 years from now, assuming we learn how to create immortality in the meantime. Another victory for efficient markets!

Plus the "fantastic" idea by this "brilliant" innovator has so many obvious and fundamental problems that anyone with basic business and finance knowledge wouldn't even bother starting down the road he took.

Eh, whatever. I'm done. I'm too dazzled by all the geniuses in this thread to continue.

I don't normally post. I didn't read many previous comments. I'm sure nobody cares. But, I'd lay money on Timex over the haters.

What he is doing is essentially allowing you to bet on poker players in tournaments. That is what you are doing anyway when you buy shares of xxx player in xxx tournament anyhow. For example, the player is offering himself at -130 but makes a great case for how he's easily -150 so everyone swoops in to buy shares. The beauty of this is, his lines don't have to be anywhere close to accurate as he doesn't allow you to bet the other side.

I hope Timex has done extensive algorithms on the variance and uses max bets wisely. If this plan comes to fruition, he will almost definitely get a bunch of action from someone like Ivey laying 50k on himself. And with some bad luck, there goes half his bankroll.