[CrisBrown]

Hi Saborion,

Many pros have backers, for tournament or even ring game play. For example, Able is good enough to beat a $50/$100 NL game consistently, but he can only afford $5/$10 games on his own bankroll. Baker offers to bankroll him enough to play $50/$100 games, for a 50/50 split. Baker may not even be a poker player; for him it's purely an investment. If Able earns a 50% annual return, Baker is getting a better return on his money (25%) than he would most other investments, and Able is making 5x more than he could on his own bankroll.

Similarly, a group of players may pool their bankroll and split their winnings, to reduce their collective variance. Able may be down $5K on a given week, but Baker may be up $10K and Cain up $4K, so collectively they're up $9K (and each profits $3K) on the week. If they're all good players, the odds that all three -- or even two out of three -- will be way down over a given week are pretty small. So they get a more stable income collectively than if each were playing individually. Doyle Brunson, Amarillo Slim, and Sailor Roberts ran a partnership like this for six years early in their careers.

But yes, if a player has sufficient capital (bankroll) to sustain routine swings at his most profitable stakes -- the highest stakes at which he can consistently beat the game -- it would be a mistake to sell a percentage of his action. He's not gaining security, and he probably won't post a sufficient marginal gain at higher stakes to offset the percentage he's giving up. It might be worthwhile if his backer were also handling other aspects of the poker business, such as bookkeeping (for tax purposes), travel arrangements, etc., but it's usually a mistake.

Cris