Poker is pricey, even for the best
One of the aspects of the poker world that casual poker fans were made well aware of at this summer’s World Series of Poker was the practice of staking or selling action. The story of Nick Marchington and his Main Event staking deal that went wrong has made the headlines in the weeks since the WSOP ended. We are all certainly familiar with how staking works at this point, even if we had never heard of it before (by “we,” I mean the royal “we”). Recently, Poker Hall of Famer Daniel Negreanu announced that he is selling his action for the upcoming World Series of Poker Europe.
In a Twitter post, Negreanu did the math on how much a player would have to spend if they wanted to participate in every WSOP Europe event. For all 15 events, assuming one never re-buys, Negreanu determined the total to be €449,600. There are a lot of re-buys available, though, so factoring in a bunch of re-buys, that figure ballooned to €1,211,700.
His point: it is pretty ridiculous nowadays for a poker player, even one of Negreanu’s stature, to pay for all of their buy-ins themselves.
As such, Negreanu said he will sell parts of his action at no markup. Details have yet to be announced.
If at first you don’t succeed…
There is more to this story, though. Negreanu did the same thing this summer for the WSOP, but it did not go as planned.
Negreanu offered up 10 percent of his action for tournaments with $1,500 buy-ins and under, 25 percent of his action for events from $1,501 to $10,000, and 50 percent of his action for buy-ins $10,001 and up. All at no markup.
If you thought that a deal like this would get a ton of interest, you would be right. It was so popular, in fact, that all three tiers sold out in minutes. There was a serious problem, though. A glitch on Negreanu’s website (he took orders via credit card) resulted in a massive oversell. Instead of taking about $275,000 in orders, he took $1.8 million.
Negreanu told everyone what happened and processed refunds for tons of people, paying about $60,000 in credit card fees out of his pocket.
…try, try again.
Which takes us back to the present. The pieces of his action for WSOP Europe will initially go to people who were refunded from this summer. Negreanu knows lots of fans were disappointed that they couldn’t sweat along with him (and Negreanu did very well this summer), so he wants those who thought they were in only to be told they weren’t to get first dibs.
As mentioned, further details about how much action he is selling and how people can make their purchases will be announced in the near future.
Daniel Negreanu also said that he is ok with re-buys to an extent, but that the WSOP Europe schedule “is way too unlimited rebuy heavy.”
“It’s ok to have a few, it really is fine, but there isn’t anything close to a freezeout in the whole schedule,” he added.
