Yesterday, we talked about the ins and outs of basic staking agreements.  Many of the players at this years WSOP will be involved in poker staking arrangements.  It’s not just for live players.  Many online poker players are too.   Some agreements cover those that both play poker online and live poker, some are just for live events, some just for tournaments, some just for those only play online poker, some just for cash games.  There are many variations.

However, if you are considering backing a player you should be aware of many scams losing backed players have employed to get one over on the one guy taking a leap of faith in his playing ability. 

One easy scam is an online player that is backed, may take his backers money and “dump” it to another player.  Say, the online player is backed for cash games.  Well, he simply plays his wife heads up and loses the money to her account.  They then use it to pay bills or paty.  Thus, he skims from the backer. 

Sure he’ll owe makeup, but if he’s in a temporary bind, he might rationalize it that he’ll return the money to the “backed” account at a later date.  Sometimes they do, oftentimes they don’t.  They may have access to the second account, so if they are backed for MTTs only, perhaps, they’ll use the money in the second account to play cash games.  Or they simply cash out the second account. 

This method is effective even for a winning backed cash game player.  He’d slowly leak out money in losses (to himself) which offsets the total winnings he has to report to his backer.    Thus, he’s skimming and stealing from the backer by not paying him his true percentage.   A MTT player might report those losses at ficitious tournament buy-ins and try the same scam.

It’s easy to see why multi-accounting presents such a wide range of problems for not only the poker sites but for the shadow interest of backing players.   

Players in makeup are obligated to only play for their backer.  It’d be shady to have two backers on multiple accounts or for the same tournaments.  In fact, a player could easily report to both backers he entered and failed a tournament.  Show them both the same receipt and pocket the buy-in from one benefactor, having played on the other’s but not cashed.  Or worse, he could tell both backers he bought in, when he didn’t and now pocket double the cash.

Course, most of these scams still run up the makeup.  The player may believe he’ll pull himself out of the hole at some point, and rationalizes the small thefts as just doing what he needs to do to survive in the short term.  Still, the actions are theft no matter the rationalization.

As a backer, you should demand tournament receipts.  You should require single monitored accounts.  You should track activity to make sure you not getting stolen from.  You should be involved.  You should never let a stakehorse slowly leak money to a second account because you should be forbidding the player to continue playing an account he can’t beat. 

In poker there is a great element of trust, and despite being capable of sniffing out a bluff, many backers can’t sniff out a con.  One way, to prevent these activities if the backers pockets are deep enough is to help with bills when the horse is deep in the makeup (you can add it to the makeup) or set it up in a separate loan that is still payable even if the horse quits poker.

There is a lot of risk in backing a player but there is also great upside.  A handful of top pros have made more than they’ve ever won in poker by backing other players.  They also get to sweat multiple people in the same event, and if their players are good, it cuts down on the variance.  Successful stakers such as Eric Lindgren or Johnny Bax also recognize when to cut ties with a bad investment and are good evaluators of talent.