In a game way money is the way we keep score, is moving cash between safe places to play one of the biggest hurdles for poker players?
Last week I interviewed Super High Roller Sam Grafton and I asked him how hard it was moving money back and forth to Triton events. He answered that high stakes players structure their bankrolls around accessibility, which makes sense.
The reason I asked him was because it was top of mind for me. Recently I have noticed lots of instances which highlighted how difficult money management is for poker players.
At the same event, I was with a friend who was struggling to get rid of Scottish pounds. For those who do not know, for some backwards reason even though an English £20 note and a Scottish £20 note are the same legal currency, some places in England will not accept the Scottish notes. We also often refuse to accept £50 notes because they are ‘too big’ (although thanks to inflation that will not be an issue for long).
After the WSOP I was fortunate to have won a few prop bets on the Tice/Becker crossbook and also had a piece of somebody who went deep in the Main Event. The wrinkle in this was the only way I could get my prop bet money was in a cryptocurrency I didn’t understand and the player I bought a piece of was Canadian. I ended up losing the crypto on an exchange due to a silly error on my part and with my Canadian friend I had to wait until this week for his bank to clear the cheque (and a further 25% of it I won’t get till next year because of tax reasons).
Is liquidity the biggest hurdle?
Back to my homeland and here in the UK we have recently introduced very strict KYC laws. I was at a casino in London last week and very surprised at how many questions I had to answer to simply join (it used to be a case of showing them some ID and taking a picture) and online every room I play on either has strict deposit limits or loss limits. It has hampered my prospects of moving up stakes because while my bankroll can easily sustain losing 20 buy-ins of my new stake, I am having a hard time convincing the UK government of that.
These are just a few small stories, but it was only this month that I realised how many of them I hear all the time in poker. Luckily for me, I am not a professional poker player, but all of this recently made me think about how difficult it actually is for them. If the swings and challenges of the game are not hard enough, money management might be the secret skill that separates the big winners from the people who quit.
In a game where money is the way we keep score, liquidity issues might be the biggest hurdle to overcome. Sports bettors have a similar issue, they inevitably get banned from bookmakers and online sportsbooks for winning too much, so the soft skill they have to master is convincing people they can trust to put money on for them (known as being a ‘Beard’). In poker, the biggest hurdle might be moving money safely from one way of playing to another.
Have you ever had issues moving money from one place to another for poker? Let us know in the comments: