Poker Stables Need To Be Curbed

“The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, the devil will come, and Faustas must be damned” – Christopher Marlowe

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In my two previous articles in this series, I argued for the curbing of Late Registration and Unlimited Re-Entry in poker tournaments. The running theme of these articles is that players, especially professional ones, cannot be expected to behave against their best interests. From time to time, they may make choices which are sub-optimal, either wittingly or unwittingly, but the sharps will generally try to capitalize on advantageous situations. The power lies solely with the poker operators to limit the edge-seeking behavior of these players. They are responsible for the longterm health of the poker ecology.

To complete the trilogy, I would now like to discuss poker stables, their impact on the poker ecosystem at scale and the reasons why their influence needs to be curbed. Just as operators must resist the temptation to have unlimited re-entry and egregiously long late registration, so too must they resist the temptation to bolster liquidity by being in cahoots with poker stables.

It might initially seem like a good idea for an operator to court the owners of such entities, to hand them a generous rakeback deal or other incentives in exchange for instant online traffic or some overlay protection for a live event. It’s certainly a shortcut to making your site or event appear successful and thriving. In a game in which liquidity is king, taking such a shortcut is enticing because big numbers attract big numbers and players tend to follow the crowd.

The Case For Stables

Let me start by making it clear that I am not against stables. It is a very natural way for a poker player or group of poker players to expand their interest. It is also inevitable in a world in where we all share and buy pieces of each other that arrangements would become formalized and staking operations expand to the point that they meet the definition of a stable. It would be silly to take issue with entities which provide financial support for players in a game with so much variance. They are important parts of our eco-system.

Poker is tough these days and the financial barrier to entry is higher than it was when I started out eighteen years ago. Freerolls are few and far between in the current poker landscape. Most sites rake the micros way too much which makes moving up very hard. Structures are faster for the most part than they used to be, reducing potential edges and making it more difficult to build a bankroll. PKOs, Spins and other format innovations have helped to spread the money around too.

It’s still possible to grind it up from a modest roll but it’s easier to play some volume at low stakes, do a database review, plug some leaks, play some more volume and then send evidence of a winning style to a stable. If the prospective backers like what they see, the next step is usually a meeting to ascertain whether the player is trustworthy, reliable and coachable. If they are, then a mutually beneficial relationship can bloom.

The Firm

Poker stables are not a particularly new thing but it’s fair to say that they have evolved over the years. Between 2012 and 2017, I managed a small stable with fellow Irish poker pros Dara O’Kearney, Daragh Davey and Jason Tompkins. ‘The Firm’, as it was known, staked a dozen or so players for mostly mid-stakes live and online tournaments. It was a profitable venture overall but not massively so. However, our motivations were not only financial. It was, important to us because we wanted to support up and coming poker talent.

From the player’s perspective, the downside of being staked is they have to give up some percentage of future winnings to the stable. The upside is they get to play in bigger games which they can beat but cannot afford, with no personal exposure to the downswings and hopefully some tutelage along the way. ‘The Firm’ took that last part very seriously, looking to foster good study habits and create a collective brain trust which would benefit all.

While we certainly didn’t lack professionalism in our approach, there were more adept and businesslike staking outfits around back then. In the years since, some of these have grown into super-stables with hundreds of players. Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with that but it does create certain temptations for the backers who understand that owning a big stable gives them some leverage.

Stables Exercising Their Leverage

About five years ago, Unibet Poker, the site for which I am an ambassador, was approached by a big poker stable. The site had just launched HexaPro, its Jackpot Sit ‘n’ Go product and Kris Bergvall, the then Head Of Poker, told me how he was made a very tempting offer.

“The stable was looking for a bespoke affiliate deal for its players. They already had four players playing on the site and they gave us their account numbers so we could see what they could deliver. All four players were in the top 10 of the highest raking HexaPro players on the site. In retrospect, showing the receipts was a smart negotiating tactic because we knew that we would lose some of our highest volume players if we did not reach a deal.

In terms of cost, they were asking for a very high total rakeback percentage for the players which would make them close to break-even or even unprofitable depending on jurisdiction and tax environment. Still, from an overall P&L perspective it can easily be profitable with the increased game count that the liquidity provides.”

Down the years, similar offers have been made to every poker site and you can see why many have got into bed with stables. The allure of a ready-made player pool of game-starters, liquidity-providers and overlay-protectors has been too much to resist for many heads of poker, who themselves might benefit from their site’s perceived sudden growth.

Unibet Poker Said No to Stables

Bergvall ultimately passed on the proposal, feeling like to work with stables went against the ethos of Unibet Poker with its focus on the experience of recreational players and its commitment to keeping a level playing field. There was the risk of conflicts of interest between players from the same stable and how that could lead to collusion. There was also some concern about whether the stable model was tenable in the longterm.

“I determined the sustainability of any profits derived from stable players was questionable because the cost of running the product and promotional spend would only be borne by non-stable players. If the stable players were to ever account for too much of the rake/revenue, then the site might not even balance its books. I also did not want us to be beholden to a third party that could pull the rug from our player liquidity.”

These middle to longterm risks are not hypothetical. They are very real and sites which have associated themselves with stables have suffered the consequences. For a little while, it appears that they are getting bigger with their guarantees increasing week after week. However, before long, it becomes obvious that their fields are full of strong regulars. The instances of soft-playing and chip-dumping go up. Players emigrate to softer pastures, guarantees get missed and the ratio of stable player to non-stable player rises.

A Rock and a Hard Place

At this point, the sites are between a rock and a hard place. Reduce guarantees or eat overlay? Keep the deal going with the stable and potentially run at a loss or terminate the deal with the stable and have numbers reduce even further? Getting out of such a death spiral is incredibly difficult.

It is the same for live operators who associate with stables or, worse still, cut out the middle-man by putting players into tournaments themselves as a way to bloat prizepools or hit guarantees. Not only do they become too reliant on that kind of artificial liquidity but they actually foster a culture within certain parts of the player pool of not buying in themselves because the chances of getting put in ‘on a freeroll’ is very high.

At that point, the operator is doomed to either eat the overlay or continue to prop up their own games. If they choose to do the latter, game integrity is liable to breakdown with players motivated to spin up a stack recklessly because there is no downside to busting if the desperate operator will put you straight back in.

It might feel like a windfall for the players who get their bankrolls supplied but it is actually really bad for the game as it destroys the purity of the competition. The increased risk of collusion leads to suspicion and there is resentment between those who are put in and those who paid their buy-in. Ultimately, there is an irreversible corrosion of trust between both player and player and operator and player.

Stables Cheating

Over the years, accusations have been made against a number of Brazilian poker stables including 9Tales and The 4bet Poker Team. A year ago, I spoke with a Portuguese player who, when applying to a Brazilian stable, was told that he could expect to have his deep runs ghosted by the stable-owners. Sadly this kind of thing is all too common. Back in 2022, poker pro Martin Zamani blew the whistle on cheating by a poker stable run by Bryn Kenney. He said that he and other players were encouraged to collude, soft-play, account-share, use real-time assistance (RTA) software and chip dump to one another on GGPoker.

Zamani claimed that Kenney had a working relationship with GGPoker, assigned by them to deploy his players to prevent overlays, receiving substantial rake-back from the site as compensation. In an interview with Doug Polk, he said that in some $5K and $10K tournaments with ambitious guarantees, Kenney would order his horses not just to enter but also to play loosely and aggressively in an effort to bust players and force rebuys.

Somewhat ironically, in April of this year, it was GGPoker who clamped down on poker stables after Ivan Bryksin, the CEO of PokerOK (a Russian skin of the GG network) labelled them “the greatest threat to the purity, integrity, and equality of poker today.” A joint statement from PokerOK and GGPoker Network insisted that the only permissible backing of players in tournaments was via the staking functionality within the client. It also warned that any suspicious play by those known to be in staking relationships would result in account closure and the confiscation of funds.

Faustian Bargain

While it is creditable that GGPoker attempted to tackle the problems arising from stables, it is important to recognize that it created those problems for itself in the first place. The boost in liquidity was a positive as it was building up its player base but the negatives are now obvious as it now widely regarded as by far the toughest site. It’s also worth pointing out that the idea of restricting all staking activities to an in-house model comes with its own concerns. Sure, it’s transparent in one sense but it’s also possible that this creates a platform which more easily allows a site to stake players themselves.

Poker stables have spoken out against the policies of GGPoker, feeling like they are draconian as they unfairly target stables who, in another sense, are important to the health of the poker ecosystem, providing as they do liquidity for games to start, run and grow. That is a fair counterpoint. If a stable is operating independently of a site and insisting upon scrupulous honesty from its players, then it is certainly contributing to the well-being of poker.

If a stable attempts to use its clout to acquire favourable terms with a poker operator, that is when it needs to be curbed. That is when we need operators to see the bigger picture, resist the allure of short-term gains and fundamentally understand where that path leads. Doing business with the stables might seem like the fast-track to growth but it is doing a deal with the devil and like all Faustian bargains, it comes at a serious cost.

David is a professional poker player, strategy writer, podcast producer, and poker brand ambassador. He has written over 600 blogs and articles on poker; including news, opinion and strategy. He has been a professional poker player since 2006 and is the producer and host of the 2-time GPI Global Poker Award winning podcast ‘The Chip Race.’ David has also been a brand ambassador for Unibet since 2017.