Professional poker player Doug “WCGRider” Polk embarked on a bankroll challenge this week. These types of challenges are nothing new – plenty of players have tried them – but they are still a lot of fun. Polk began his Sunday, attempting to grow an online poker bankroll from $100 to $10,000 in the appropriately named “$100 to $10,000 Challenge.”
The most famous bankroll challenge was done by Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, back in 2006 when he wasn’t a known asshole. Ferguson did his a bit different than will Polk, aiming to generate a $10,000 bankroll from nothing. He started by playing in freerolls on Full Tilt Poker, taking several weeks to make just two dollars. He lost that money, but kept plugging away, eventually making $22 in freerolls. His breakthrough came when he turned a second place finish in a one dollar tourney into $104.
From there, Ferguson went on to hit his $10,000 in a total of about a year and a half. He made it all the way up to $28,000 before falling back below the $10,000 mark.
In an interview with PokerUpdate.com, Polk said that one way his challenge differs from Ferguson’s, aside from starting with $100, is that Ferguson had a strict set of rules, including one that stipulated that he had to have 20 buy-ins to sit down in a cash game. Polk feels that this rule, specifically, was “very aggressive” and “inadvisable.”
Polk, instead, has not set any rules for his play. He is going to treat the money like it is his own bankroll, trying not to lose it all.
He also said that Ferguson’s challenge is “long outdated,” as he started it before the UIGEA was passed, when online poker was much softer than it is now.
When asked why he is doing this, Polk said, “I took on this challenge because I want to prove that, even in today’s tough online poker ecosystem, a hopeful micro stakes grinder can still run up a bankroll. The days of the 2003 poker boom may be behind us, but that doesn’t mean we have to give up and blame our failure on the system.”
Polk is playing the entire challenge on WSOP.com in Nevada, streaming his sessions on UpSwing Poker’s Twitch channel. From what I have seen so far, he constantly interacts with viewers, narrating his games and answering strategy questions.
He told PokerUpdate that he is mostly going to play No-Limit Hold’em, though he is currently playing Pot-Limit Omaha (and winning a big hand for the buy-in he was playing). Polk began the challenge poorly, losing $17 in the first day, but that’s poker. One could argue that it is almost better that way, as having a huge run-up on day one could potentially make Polk and his fans overconfident.
As I write this, he is in the fourth day of the challenge and has worked his way back to around break even.