Why not just sell 400% at 1.4? You've got a kid to feed, and it's Vegas baby!

ETA: People have sold at 2:1 for the Main Event and that tourney has the potential for it to be a profitable investment. 1.4 in a tough fielded WPT does not, unless you are a super duper star.

right, which is a big part of why I avoided it in the first place. of course then there was some resentment I guess, b/c one of my best friends who also plays poker invested $100 and won $12,000+ and my other friends and family don't know why I'm wiring $80k to strangers instead of just having sold to them.

and, well, if I'm gonna be wiring $80k to people, I would rather it be people I know, yes? but yeah, obv as a part-time player, chances are I will go the rest of my life without another 6 figure score. the offers will of course dry up as that becomes the case. another point for 'striking while the iron is hot?'

yeah I think it's whatever, i laugh at the markups some people charge, but it's money and people like money so I don't hold it against you for taking a profitable opportunity from investors who don't seem to mind. I'm not THE DARK KNIGHT of mttc tho, so i'm not here to protect and serve =).

Yeah, figured that was the next point. I guess I see a huge difference between overselling and selling at higher markup. Just like I see a difference between selling at 1.4 and taking money to wear a logo when I won't be on TV. I turned that down, because it FOR SURE is not a good deal for that guy. 1.4, when considering the entertainment value surely might be a good use of a couple hundred bucks. If someone buys $280 of me in a WPT for 2% is that really so much worse than playing $25 a hand blackjack for a couple hours? None of these guys are hurting for discretionary income. If I had someone offer me money I knew they couldn't afford, I would not accept it.

I agree there is a difference, but you're justifying your actions as a way to provide for your family while going to Vegas. That's wrong, the entertainment justification has some plausibility but your other arguments seem kind of scummy, but I'd mainly just like to note the potential of creating bad blood amongst your friends and that has little to do with it's profitability. That just has to do with mixing gambling/business with friends.

Also, if I ever have a family and am struggling to provide(not saying that's you fwiw), maybe I would do a bit of hustling. I wouldn't hustle my friends, family and community though, and remember this isn't Craigslist or the ThisIsHowTheRealWorldWorks open market, this is 2p2.

JT seems to fit the stereotypes of old school player who doesn't know tournament theory and the LAG live NLHE cash pro who likes to throw chips around but doesn't understand hand selection, odds, and math well. The 3 plays were terrible, but I don't understand the level of attach on him.

A lot of the people selling action for live MTTs in the marketplace and huge live results. Think that makes it easier to get good value selling to the public rather than to a wealthy backer or selling or trading shares with friends.

Guess if you win 2 major tournaments, you can freeroll later ones, like JT and JL. Obviously, the buyins are expensive and these guys may have sold some of the action in their big wins.

I have seen JL on TV a couple of times. I wouldn't pay 140% for shares of his results in a high roller, but maybe it's a good deal. I would pay more than 140% for shares in Seidel in a high roller.

couple final notes on the selling shares thing:

there is also some utility in the chance at a big score. Lots of people would pay $12 for a 1 in 1000 chance at $10k. The $12 is meaningless, the 10k would do a lot for them. So even though the EV is less than $10, the EU could be more than $10. Similar to a lottery ticket.

also, i think there is a difference in that I literally wasn't going to be able to play it without selling. I think if I, say, won a $500 satty into the WPT Main and then sold at 1.4, that's a lot different than choosing "selling at 1.4 and playing" over "not playing".

this is not a reason to be able to sell at 1.4 DUCY?

no, enlighten me.

if you mean i should have better results, if I wanna charge that much:

- I won 640k in September this year
- Not all of that went to the poker roll
- I had 10k cash available, but could not justify it, even as a shot, to pay the entire entry
- I have to take off work and time away from family to play, so i need a decent chance of decent money to do so

I took a step back from this thread once everything possible had already been said about the hand that started it all and it quickly turned to 95% poo flinging (and boy does TBJ have heaps and heaps to fling!). But now that I have a little time, I'll put myself back into the crosshairs for a short stretch...

All of this talk about the marketplace has gotten silly. As has already been said a dozen times, it's called a market-place for a reason. Anyone can sell their product and if it's overpriced, then no one will buy it. The primary ways that people might truly scam the staking marketplace are if they're planning to chip dump to a friend, oversell and donk out, or simply not play a tourney. If you discover that this has happened with someone, then by all means bring it to everyone's attention. But if someone has sold less than the buy-in and they set out to do as advertised, Win the tournament, then there's nothing wrong with what they did. They are not a scammer/idiot/moron. They're a shrewd salesman. It's somewhat noble to take the time to inform the rest of the community that you think someone is overpriced (minus all the filth surrounding some accusations), but after you've made your point, move on and let the market work as it's supposed to.

As to what a fair price should be... it obviously shouldn't exactly match someone's EV anyway (if we knew their EV), unless the person is new and trying to establish themselves, like a poker "intern". When someone already has a reputation, you're paying that person to play for you. If it's a big $10K+ event, then they could end up spending 4 to 5 days, possibly more, at the tables in an effort to make you money. So of course they get to charge a premium over their EV. In the case of JT and JL, part of that premium is so you can have the excitement of railing someone in a major event. You're paying a vig for the gambling experience. It's so you can say "Hey, I've got a piece of him" to all your buddies if they do happen to go deep. We could debate what a fair wage should be, but the bottom line is that the premium is justified and the better known players will be able to get a higher premium off of buyers. And if you don't like the price, then don't buy it. Personally, the only person I ever stake is myself, excluding the occasional swap with a friend, so I agree that most staking offers aren't worth it to me. But obviously there are plenty of others that are interested in those deals.

And frankly, all of the speculation about someone's EV is ridiculous as well. Until the live poker world starts tracking ALL Buy-Ins instead of just Cashes then we'll never have a proper estimate of EV and ROI. (we'll also never have a legitimate player "index" either...) If we had all the buy-in information then someone could build a Sagarin-like model that included strength of opponents in establishing how significant a particular win or cash was. More importantly you'd actually know how much the player had burnt on lost buy-ins. Regardless of the lack of buy-in info, it is completely insane that TBJ and others have argued that 8 years of live success isn't a large enough sample size, but that 3 hands in one tournament is. That makes zero sense. We all deviate from our "expected" style from time to time, so you can't judge someone's overall EV from the details of a few publicized hands, no matter how absurd you think they are.

We don't know Joe's true EV, but we do know that he has a couple of huge wins that he can use to sell himself in the marketplace. Like it or not, that's how the world works. People rest on the laurels of isolated successes all of the time and continue to be given additional chances even if they have trouble repeating it. How many movies has M Night Shammalamma been paid millions to make since Sixth Sense + Unbreakable? And were any of them good? Yet he still got invested in... and truth be told, he still made those investors money in most if not all cases, so power to them. (okay, so maybe that wasn't the best example... but seriously, who paid real money to see The Happening? Marky Mark vs. Killer trees? C'mon man!)

If you want something better for the poker staking/player evaluating world, then be constructive and campaign to get all buy-ins tracked so a proper model can be built. (but somehow keep the IRS from tapping into it...) Don't waste everyone's time by dragging Joe's or other peep's names through the mud with minimal to zero justification. I realize that a chunk of the 2p2 gen pop loves the smell of fresh poo in the morning, as noted by all of the blind support of TBJ in this thread and others, but that still doesn't justify all of these childish rants about Joe. Please return to directing them towards me or other randoms to your heart's content.

And all joking/debating/criticizing aside... For the sake of yourself, your poker game, and everyone who loves you, please get help Justin. If you do have the technical chops that many here claim that you have, then you may be a therapist/life coach/SSRI away from getting over the hump and becoming the successful player that you believe you should be.

Of all your points, they "hey we're paying a vig for the gambling experience" is the only one that is reasonable.

Too much for me to go into tho

Sick assumption bro, ever hear of running like mud?

Cool, I'll take agreement even on a minor point. Baby steps.

It's not so much about how bad he's running, but how he acts in this forum and in R/L (as far as I've heard). I'll admit that I'm connecting a lot of dots there and I'm no psychiatrist, but it's not a huge stretch to assume that his emotional issues affect his game. Of course, his rants on here could simply be a massive level, but it would one gross level, considering the talk of hating life and suicide. And from the little I've seen in blogs about his live action, it doesn't seem like an act. I only surveyed a small sample size of blog posts, though...

Look back at how the handful of well-known successful players have responded in this thread. I'm not saying they're clearly the "best" players who have posted (and let's not talk about EVs), but we know that they've all had big wins plus numerous FTs at some point in their career, many of which were in the last couple of years against challenging fields. In particular take another peek at Faraz' post. This is the one guy who no one would've blamed if he came in here to vent. I doubt many of us would've had the composure to come in here the next morning and say "I totally understand his play" when referring to Joe's move with 2-4o. Jaka had Aces cracked on a 50K bubble by a hand that had little business in the hand. But at the end of the day "That's Poker" and he respects that. And he was mature enough to quickly move on from the bubble hand, making the bulk of his post about how 2p2 should be a constructive community with a focus on educating others rather than berating them to no end. Yet here were are, 30+ pages later, and the thread is still dominated by negative posts.

To put it into everyone's favorite terms... My point is that emotional instability is generally -EV for poker. Perhaps there's an outlier or two that can transform into a calm, balanced person at the table, but in most cases the personality carries right on over to the table. And if you've got issues at the table then clearly you won't make the same decisions you would've made if your head was clear.

You are not wrong on any of this but it doesn't necessarily have to apply to everyone. Justin could easily be playing amazing poker and just legitimately running terrible, his performances might have zero correlation to his life outlook or personal life. The only person who could be the judge of that is himself.

Sure, anything's possible. Someone out there in the poker space has to be the unluckiest player and run the worst, and if that happens to be Justin, then so be it. And as I said above, it is possible, albeit unlikely, that someone with serious personal issues can lock it all up when they sit at the table.

But we've all seen the player type a hundred times. "I never get lucky. They always suck out." Plenty of players are blind to their own leaks and bad play and blame their failures on luck, dealers, other players, the moon, etc. Then we they do happen to bink... they "deserved" it or they somehow convince themselves it was a good play despite getting it in bad. "How does he have Aces in that spot? He never has a strong hand there!"

I have no illusions that Justin will take anything that I say seriously. I don't know him, he doesn't know me, and as you said, only he can really get to the bottom of his problems. But I was bored yesterday and made the post that I made. So it goes...

come on shuffle up and deal

Agree with Farmer. Look how Jaka didn't complain at all in this thread about the moron pushing with 42o and busting his aces. Often you see poker players show no reaction to bad beats or whatever.

Don't think Justin is unstable. However, berating people and complaining about bad luck is not mark of a successful player. Justin's strategy posts are good, so maybe his problem is the way he handles bad play and bad luck.

The difference is, this is not some random you meet at a cash table in a casino complaining about running bad for 30 years while playing great. we KNOW that Justin is really really good at poker. We've read his posts, talked with him irl, played with him irl, etc. He may be a classless know-it-all pompous arrogant self-entitled jerk with little respect of others, but he's almost always right, honest to a fault, and truly a terrific poker player and poker mind. That is why we care about what he has to say. It has little to do with the entertainment he provides the community by his rants (though they are undoubtedly some of the most entertaining posts on the site). If he was actually some clueless clown, he would have been run off the 2p2 streets years ago.

Joe Tehan seems like the classic "thinks he's a lot better than he is" poker player because he's run really well in a couple of big tournaments. Justin has asked for his online names multiple times and he hasn't shared. I have never played with him, so maybe he's not that bad, but "I messed up under pressure" (which btw he hasn't even admitted to yet) is not a legitimate excuse for the atrocity of those plays. Those are hardcore fundamental mistakes that a good player should and would never make.

clink clink clink

lol how did i miss this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsFLCX7-TBU

for a guy with $4M in cashes and only 500K in buy ins he seems pretty excited to get 80 bucks

PLUS ONE QUIT TEH STALLIN'

I wouldn't jump at the chance to play a multiple bpr winner for rolls. Just my .02