Based on the title, one may assume I'm going to attend the 10k H.O.R.S.E in this year's WSOP. Well, I'm not. Based on the title, someone may also assume I'm going to invest on a horse. Well, not that one either. Instead, circa yesterday I have myself become a horse.

 

In poker terms, a horse means "someone who is being staked". Long story short, I was approached by a friend who is an upper mid-stakes cash game player, asking me if I want to sell a share of my games to him. He's been backing me in the past with very good results, and has confidence in my game. Eventually we landed a deal where he stakes me for $16,000 and covers all the risk (if I bust 16k, I have to refund $0), but we share the profits 50-50. I'm nowhere near busto and didn't really need this at the moment, but it felt like a good idea for various reasons.

 

The best thing about our agreement is that now I can finally separate my life roll and poker roll. I was able to withdraw all my rolls online and replace it with my backer's money. The money I withdrew should be enough to get by until the end of the year, and obviously we're going to make monthly withdrawals with my backer too. For the first time I can fully concentrate on making the most +ev decisions in tournaments without having to worry about creating too much variance with risky lines. I don't have to worry about hitting a huge downswing and having to eat cup noodles and finding a job at McDonald's (I did that for a year already, by the way). I no longer have to think about the money on top of the prize pools as money, I can just think of them as numbers and concentrate on playing.

 

The second best thing is that I can now play higher stakes and especially sunday tournaments. I've usually sattied myself into sunday majors or played one or two of them on my own expense, but now I can play a whole lot more of them without having to worry about them affecting my bankroll. Obviously I'm still not going to play every single major, because with a bad run the 16k would be pretty quickly destroyed if we chose to invest 2k on large-field tournaments every sunday), but at least I can play the most important ones like Championchip at Ongame and the Microgaming Sunday rebuy.

 

So, it's time to wrap up the past four months, which were my first as an MTT player. During that time I won $25k from MTTs, and with rakeback, sit and goes and cash games I made a total net profit of $34000. Not bad for an MTT newbie for ~100 day's work!

 

Now it's time to look forward to new adventures and make some serious $ to both me and my backer. We got a nice head start yesterday when I scooped the Microgaming 25€ nightly rebuy for almost 8k$ (see attached files), literally in my first session as a backed player.

 

PS. I've received a couple of private messages regarding coaching. I haven't been able to get back to anyone, as due to some glitch in the Coinflip forum software it doesn't allow me to send private messages. I'm not coaching at the moment for various reasons, mainly because I really am just a luckbox who sucks at teh pokers. However, if you have any additional questions or enquiries you can contact me via PM at the Two Plus Two forums (SN there: Chuck Bass) or via email: manichedgehog (at) gmail dot com.