Jim Reid is a longtime lover of poker, a member of the PokerOrg Player Advisory Board, and host of the popular RecPoker podcast. He’s also now set to be one of the potential winners of the 2024 WSOP Main Event.
Some of you may have read my article earlier this summer going over how I prepare for the WSOP each year. Well, it’s been a blast of a trip so far, and earlier this week I had enough bankroll left over that I was considering rolling it into a Main Event seat. But good gravy, that is an expensive proposition!
For most recreational players, being able to enter the WSOP Main Event is at best a bucket list item, and at worst a pipe dream. Let’s face it, $10,000 is a LOT of money and for most of us it would be downright irresponsible to put it all towards one poker tournament, no matter how famous, fun, or prestigious it is.
Yet year after year, thousands of non-professional players flock to Las Vegas in July to do exactly that. The ‘why’ is obvious – the question is: how? As it turns out, the keys to punching above your weight in the poker world comes down to the three ‘S’s: satellites, staking and sweating.
Win it like Chris Moneymaker
There are a million ways to ‘satty’ into the Main Event every year. Whether it’s online qualifiers, local home games, or even playing earlier events in the series that are run here in Las Vegas by the WSOP specifically to award seats to the Main, there are satellites of every level of buy-in, format and structure. It’s really just a math problem.
Want to win a $10,000 Main Event seat for $1,000? All you need is nine other players who also want to try their luck. Only have $500 to risk? OK, well now you’re going to need to find 19 other players. Want to shoot your shot for a hundred bucks? Hope you’ve got 99 friends! But as long as it all adds up to $10,000, there’s a path to SOMEONE in that tournament winning it and playing the Main.
Staking – poker as a business
Staking in its purest form is often viewed as a way of investing: literally, people with money invest in the performance of other people that they think are good at poker! The investors will, for example, cover half of the player’s tournament costs in return for half of their winnings.
It’s a win/win: the investors, or backers, get a return on their investment, and the player gets to enter bigger tournaments than they could afford on their own, or they get to reduce the variance of tournament poker by spreading their own investment over a larger set of tournaments.
Of course it can get a LOT more complicated than that, but essentially the better players offer a higher ROI on the investment of their backers, and when the player wins, everybody wins.
Sweating a friend
The other, more fun kind of staking, is less about a business investment and more about a ‘sweat’. As poker players, we are no strangers to gambling! And you’ve probably heard folks say that they enjoy watching sports even more if they have a small friendly wager on the outcome: it’s more fun to watch if they have a little ‘skin’ in the game, or something to ‘sweat’ or root for.
Poker is no different. As a social game, poker players will sometimes offer to sell some of their tournament action to friends, who act as the investors in the staking model outlined above. But, while they of course would welcome a positive return on their investment, they also get some value out of being able to ‘sweat’ their friend and cheer them on.
This year for my WSOP trip, a few friends had signed up for a small piece of my overall tournament action. I had put a little ‘sweating’ package together covering several smaller events and giving me the freedom to fire multiple bullets, or rebuys, and play more events than I would have been able to if I was only playing on my own dime. It was a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed updating them via the RecPoker Vlog that Taylor Maas produced every day that we were down here together.
The Rec's 2024 Main Event
I wasn’t planning on playing the Main Event but, as it approached, I was experiencing some serious FOMO (like I always do!) and it occurred to me that I had only had to fire one bullet into each of the events I had played so far, so I had more bankroll available near the end of the trip than I had planned for. I thought to myself: maybe I could roll that into a Main Event seat!
I ran it past my buddies and they said to take the 10% they had invested and go for it. But there was still one problem, and again, it was a math problem. The problem was that the remaining 90% of $10,000 was $9,000 and there was no way I was going to feel comfortable about putting that much of my own money into play for one poker tournament.
So, the night before Day 1A kicked off, I decided to see if there was a chance to spread my action around and I put the word out on Twitter that I was looking to sell. Then I went to bed, curious to see what kind of nibbles I might get from the poker world overnight.
Gang, I was blown away! By the end of the next day, over 30 different people from all around the world had reached out to grab a small piece – some friends, some acquaintances, and some folks that had only interacted with me on twitter and had no reason to trust me or know me at all. Now I’m all set to fire on Day 1D on Saturday, and I’m bringing along a whole team of awesome poker peeps who are interested in a fun sweat – and hopefully a big prize at the end. I still can’t really believe it.
Plenty of good in the poker world
As I get ready to fire, there are 34 folks out there, most with micro-sweats of 1% or less - some with as little a piece as 0.2% for $20 - rooting me on, and they are sharing 65.67% of my Main Event, leaving me about one third. My heart was so warmed by this amazing reception, I decided to give my last available 1% to poker’s newest fan, my friend Ben’s VERY new daughter Lucy, in the hopes that maybe a decent score can help set up a savings account for her future. All in all, it’s been a hell of a week, and I have never felt so encouraged and welcomed by the poker community.
Remember this the next time you hear about scammers, cheaters and con artists taking advantage of people in the poker world - of course there are bad apples out there, but there is a lot of goodness in the poker community too, if you know where to find it. I’m a lucky guy – now let’s see if we can bring that luck to the tables of the WSOP Main Event!
You can follow Jim Reid’s Main Event experience on PokerOrg Instant today – and hopefully right through to the final table on July 17.
