Variance in tournament poker, especially large field, high buy-in events is extremely high. For this reason, many people sell a percentage of their action to help make it more manageable. It’s the same reason why you typically invest in mutual funds, rather than an individual stock.
The basic premise is that a person who wants to be staked puts together a list of tournaments they plan to play. They may not play all of the tournaments in their package, and indeed for events like the WSOP with overlapping tournaments, it’s often impossible to do so if they make a deep run.
They then list the markup they plan to charge for the package, which is a multiplier that effectively charges a premium for allowing people to buy a piece of their package. If you have a $10,000 package of tournaments, a 1% piece of that would normally be $100. At 1.1 markup, 1% of that package would cost the investor $110. Experienced tournament poker players with a good track record can charge markup; unknowns generally cannot.
When you buy a piece of someone, you are buying a % of the total package that they are offering. If person being staked cashes in a tournament, they pay investors a % of their gross winnings based on how much of a % piece they bought. They also refund investors for any tournaments in their package that they don’t play.
Probably not. It’s our expectation that the majority of people who stake others using TastyStakes.com will already know the person they are staking. Either on a personal level, or indirectly due to their reputation or notoriety.
The idea is that you use TastyStakes to organize your tournament package, then you point your usual stakers & friends at it, and away you go. TastyStakes is an organizational and workflow tool for tournament poker players, not a shopping bazaar.
If you’re a relative unknown, you’ll need to do the groundwork to make people aware of your package, and prompt them to invest in you.
Congratulations on having your package booked up! TastyStakes was designed to be a workflow and organizational tool for tournament packages.
As such, if your tournament package is already booked up, it’s a perfect time to use TastyStakes! You’ll be able to give your stakers a place to go to track your progress and sweat you in your tournaments. And when it comes time to settle up, TastyStakes will make it extremely easy for you to figure out the refunds & payouts for each staker.
In addition, the sooner you start using TastyStakes, the more data you’ll have entered so it can calculate your end of year 1099 tax forms, and provide a staking history on the site to aid in future package offerings.
It’ll make your life and their life a whole lot easier if they have an account on TastyStakes.com, because they can just book their pieces, and see their stake on your package page.
However, your investors do not need to have an account on TastyStakes.com. You can manually add people to your package. So if someone hands you $2k at the Rio for a piece of your action, you can just add them to your package without requiring them to sign up on TastyStakes.com
That’s why we list a generic “Payout per X% piece” on your package page: so people who don’t have accounts on TastyStakes.com will have an idea of what their payout and refund is.
If you want to offer different markup and different %’s for various tournaments, TastyStakes lets you do it! Just create a new package for each group of tournaments that has the same markup and % offered.
All of your packages will be listed together on your Packages page, so you’ll have one page you can Tweet out or post on the 2+2 Marketplace forums that lists all of the packages you have offered.
Since you can display and manage all of your various packages on one page, it makes your life a whole lot easier.
TastyStakes.com is primarily meant as a workflow and organizational tool for making it easier for you to manage your tournament package. If you want to use it for just that, and have your staking arrangements private, that’s no problem.
Just check the checkbox [x] Keep Package Private on your package page, and it won’t be listed in the directory of packages, so you can use the site to organize it without the limelight.
Keep in mind that by default, investor information in terms of their name, the % piece they have, etc. is already private. Only you and the investor can see that unless you specify otherwise.
The listing on the website does serve as a documentation of the transaction, and the agreement between you and the person offering the package, should it ever come to that. However, we recommend due diligence.
TastyStakes provides a fairly extensive Profile that you can fill out on your Dashboard. The purpose of this is to allow people to see your online history and reputation. The more you fill it out, the more likely it is people will be interested in staking you.
If you are looking to stake someone, check out their profile. Do some research. Caveat emptor (buyer beware) is always a wise policy. TastyStakes makes no representations, expressed or implied, about the veracity of the information presented on the site, or the character of the people posting packages.
Obviously we will ban people who don’t fulfill their obligations, but you can help mitigate this by vetting them carefully before buying a stake.
That’s up to you. TastyStakes is similar to classified ads or sites like CraigsList.com, eBay, etc. It’s up to you to figure out how to exchange money with the people you stake, or the people who stake you. Thankfully, there are many great options available these days for exchanging money online (PayPal, Venmo, Chase QuickPay, etc.).
TastyStakes is not an escrow service, and does not handle any financial transactions. It just helps connect people who are interested in staking people, or being staked.
We looked into the idea of being an escrow; the problem is that in a traditional escrow, person A has to do X, and person B has to do Y before funds are released from an escrow. In the case of staking poker players, they actually need the money to perform their end of the deal, so a traditional escrow is not very helpful.
We also looked into the idea of taking payments to facilitate staking and distributing funds. The problem here is that two middlemen are added: TastyStakes, and a merchant processor, both of which would need to take a cut for the service offered.
We decided that the most prudent course of action was to just be really good at connecting people, and helping players manage their packages, and stay out of the monetary exchange.
If you have other questions, we’re here to help! You can contact us by clicking on the icon in the lower-right corner of the page.