Staking in Poker: Lessons From a Veteran Staker

I started my poker career over 15 years ago, and a few years later, I began staking players. My motivation wasn’t purely financial. It came from a growing frustration that I wasn’t contributing much to the world as a poker pro and from a conversation I had in Vegas with my son Paddy. He has always been socially conscious and asked me if there was a way I could use my poker success to help others.

In the aftermath of the financial collapse and the IMF bailout, Ireland was deep in recession. Austerity had taken hold, and young people faced far fewer opportunities than previous generations. But online poker was thriving, and I saw it as a possible way to create a path forward for untapped talent.

I started paying attention to the local live scene and eventually came across a young, low-stakes cash grinder named Daragh Davey. He also played the occasional tournament, online and live, but had no major results. He was grinding out a modest living, and when I told others I planned to stake him, the reaction was surprise, even ridicule.

“Why him? He’s done nothing special. Player X just got a big score in live tourney Y”

But I wasn’t interested in who had just got lucky in a tournament. I was interested in temperament and potential. Daragh was calm, ego-free, and clearly disciplined, traits I believed made him coachable and likely to improve.

His game, however, still needed work. I sent his hand histories to David Lappin, an experienced coach. David reviewed them and called me urgently.

“Stop staking him now before he loses another cent of your money. He plays like a coward.”

Actually, “coward” wasn’t the word he used; it was slightly stronger. Despite that, I stuck with my decision and hired David to coach him. That turned out to be one of the best calls I’ve ever made.
Over the next 18 months, Daragh became a consistent winner. He no longer needed staking and even had enough to join me and David as we expanded into a larger operation called “The Firm,” where we staked around a dozen players.

Backing Daragh was a clear success. The Firm, however, was more mixed. We did make money overall, but the effort and stress didn’t always feel worth it. We had our share of heartbreaks, too, with players who ghosted us, others who burned through money despite coaching, and even some who stole from us. Eventually, we all walked away from staking. Looking back, here are the most important lessons I took from the experience.

You have to trust your horses

This is the single most important rule of staking. It’s the backer’s version of Doyle Brunson’s golden rule—never play in a game where you aren’t sure you’ll be paid if you win.

It doesn’t matter how good a player is or how strong their long-term ROI looks; variance is brutal, especially in tournaments. A player might win 100K in a year but swing between 200K down and 200K up. If they disappear with your money at the top or mentally check out at the bottom, you’re the one holding the bag. As one fellow staker once put it:

“You need people who will fight for you.”

Players need to treat your money with the same respect they’d give to their own, not as a freeroll to blast off with. Most poker players are honest. The bigger danger isn’t the guy who runs off after a big score; it’s the one deep in makeup who gives up or goes full degree. And while outright scammers are rare, they do exist. If you don’t trust someone to act with integrity, don’t stake them.

Coachability Beats talent

When I started staking Daragh, it wasn’t because of his results; it was because he struck me as someone who could be coached. That instinct turned out to be spot on. Over time, I’ve learned to spot the red flags that usually signal someone won’t respond well to coaching. Here are the big ones:

Here are the primary signs:

• Ego: The naturally talented often resist feedback. They assume their instincts are enough, which can stunt their long-term development and make them difficult to coach.
• Impatience: Ambition is great, but impatience gets in the way of real progress. Players who expect instant results tend to skip foundational work and often flame out when results don’t come quickly.
• Bad Beat Obsession: If a player can’t stop talking about how unlucky they are, they’re missing the point. Variance is part of the game, and players who dwell on bad beats usually struggle to focus on long-term strategy and improvement.
• Argumentative: Healthy debate is useful, but when a player challenges every piece of advice, it becomes counterproductive. If they’re more interested in being right than getting better, progress stalls.
• Overconfidence: The worst players I’ve encountered are often the most convinced they’re great. That kind of blind spot is dangerous as it prevents self-reflection and shuts the door on growth.

Discipline and routines are vital

When I was staking Daragh, a friend of his told me he had stopped going out drinking on Saturdays so he could grind properly on Sundays. That stuck with me. That’s the kind of mindset you want in a player.
Discipline and structure are the foundation of long-term success. And that goes for both sides of the relationship. Players need to treat poker like a job, and stables need to treat staking like a business, with solid processes in place.

It’s also important to remind players that even though they’re playing with your money, they’re still the ones who’ll carry the debt. Losses go into makeup. That pile has to be cleared before they see a profit.

Know when to cut your losses

David and I started The Firm, he pointed something out – the best horses would eventually make enough to leave, while the worst would stick around. Over time, that lowers the average quality and profitability of the group.

It was a good observation, though it doesn’t tell the whole story. Some winning players prefer the security of staking. Others struggle emotionally with variance when it’s their own money on the line. And a good stable can always bring in new talent to replace outgoing winners.

But the real issue, the one most stakers get wrong, is knowing when to let someone go. There’s a strong temptation to stick with players deep in makeup. If they hit a big score, you get paid back in full. Drop them, and that makeup becomes a permanent loss.
It’s also incredibly hard on a personal level.

Letting someone go often feels like pulling the plug on their dream. But prolonging a losing arrangement is worse for both sides.

My biggest regret is that we didn’t cut ties earlier with players who clearly weren’t going to turn it around. We knew it deep down, but we ignored it.
The question I wish I’d asked more often is simple: would I start staking this player today, knowing what I know now? If the answer is no, it’s time to stop and cut your losses.

Staking isn’t just taking

f us who started staking thought it would be easy money. We were winning players. We figured we’d pass on what we knew, and the profits would roll in. It didn’t work like that.
Every player is different. What works for one doesn’t work for another. Coaching takes time, patience, and adaptability. If you’re not willing to provide that, your horses won’t thrive.

The biggest mistake players make, at any level, is assuming everyone else thinks like they do. But they don’t. Being a successful staker means recognizing that and offering the structure and support needed to bridge those gaps.

Some of us turned a profit, but many gave up because it wasn’t worth the time, stress, or emotional drain. I know top-tier players who went broke chasing the staking dream. The stables that are still around, like Team Xploit, BBZ, and Pocarr, survived because they ran things professionally from the start. They treated staking like a business, not a sweat.

There’s variance but not just variance

Ultimately, I quit staking not just because it had stopped being profitable enough to justify the effort and stress but because I realized it significantly increased my personal variance. Most former poker pros only recognize they’re no longer beating the game after going broke. There’s always a risk the game becomes unbeatable, particularly online. And if that happens while you’re bankrolling others as well as yourself, the consequences are far greater.

While I’m more optimistic about online poker now, the reality is that stakers need to recognize when the edge is gone much faster than solo players. The stables that have handled variance best are the ones that invested heavily in game selection, hand history reviews, mass data analysis, tracking profitable games, spotting leaks, and identifying exploitable trends across player pools.

In our group, only Daragh Davey consistently put in that kind of work. The rest of us didn’t, and that lack of effort cost us. Stables that do the work aren’t just more profitable, they give their players a far better shot at long-term success.