Quote:
Originally Posted by Toupee Jay
Two VERY different situations, but you're too stupid to understand that.
MENSA didn't think so when I passed their tests with room to spare.
I know the difference between how Little handles money and what's being discussed in this thread. The way that things like backing or staking are done is what's stupid. No contract, no recourse, no proof of anything. I went as far as I could in the opposite direction and I've never regretted it.
in 1985, I had never been inside a casino and as far as I knew no one that I knew played poker except for an occasional home game. I saw it on TV and got interested. I wondered what it was like to win a million dollars in a poker tournament.
I got a poker book from a library, which eventually led me to 2+2. One of the things that I found out that most of those players weren't winning a million dollars at all. It was all a big lie. I was reading about staking and selling pieces in these forums and I found out that some of those "poker millionaires" owed more than half of their check to backers.
In 1986 I was playing micro MTTs on PokerStars. I thought that it would be fun to play a big tournament, so I played a $3.30 MTT with over 4,000 players, final tabled it and cashed for $384.
I decided right then that I would never be backed, sell pieces or any of that foolishness. Someone sent me a PM, offering to back me to play $5 SNGs. I thought that was bizarre. From then on, every penny that I won would be mine and I would handle it carefully.
The way that the poker economy works, as discussed in this thread, is nuts. Would you make
any kind of verbal contract worth thousands of dollars with someone? I wouldn't and most people, inside or outside of poker, would not.
I am a Jonathan Little fan, partly because I admire the way he does business. I've learned a lot from him. He handles his money carefully. In the book that I referred to he had several cautionary tales about dumb things that players do with their money. One player got a million dollar cash and used all of it as a down payment on a ten million dollar home. That didn't end well. When Little gets a big cash he invests in real estate.
I don't do stupid stuff, and that includes business deals without a contract. I'm a bankroll nit. I'm careful, some would say too careful, but I never get burned. I can't relate to anything in the discussion in this thread so I guess this will be my final post.