From 2008, we’ve backed 1,000+ players across 50+ countries on 6 continents, investing $100M+ in their success. ⬇️ Apply to join Standard Backing Team ⬇️
Las Vegas
Joined May 2015
- Tweets1.6K
- Following487
- Followers1.7K
- Likes1.2K
Pinned Tweet
Here's the bankroll guidelines we recommend for professional online MTT players (with no other source of income):
Aggressive BR:
6 months of living expenses PLUS 500 ABI for the games you're playing
Baseline BR:
12 months of living expenses PLUS 1,000 ABI for the games you're playing
Conservative BR:
24 months of living expenses PLUS 2,000 ABI for the games you're playing
If you don't have at least 6 months living expenses AND 500 ABI you should consider having another source of income (like a part-time job) until such time as you do have that covered.
Otherwise your risk of ruin is pretty high.
9/x But the main problem with downswings isn't even the money you lose playing.
The real problem is that they set off a chain reaction.
Your bills don't stop coming because you're in a downswing and every month your life BR gets smaller.
And as much time as it takes to go on a downswing it can take even longer to get out it.
Meanwhile your life BR keeps shrinking and you're faced with a tough choice - deplete your poker BR and drop down stakes, or stick it out and hope it turns around before you go "broke"
It's REALLY hard to lose at such rates in MTTs even over relatively small sample sizes even with large field sizes.
Losing $35k in $40k of buyins is a -87% ROI.
It's rare even to see -50% ROI over samples as small as 500 games.
For the past three months, @QQPKOFFICIAL has been my main poker room in terms of volume. I’ve played around $40,000 in tournament buy-ins and lost $35,000.
Now it turns out that I may have been getting crushed by bots that, at the very least, appear to have been sharing hole-card information with each other.
Yesterday, QQPK credited my account with $90 in compensation.
I don’t have any illusions about receiving meaningful compensation at this point. But what concerns me is that thousands of the accounts flagged by @MTT_Data_Review still appear to be playing at the tables.
I hope we, as a poker community, can bring more attention to this issue and encourage QQPK to take game integrity seriously, properly investigate the accounts identified by @MTT_Data_Review , and take appropriate action.
This gels really nicely with @derek_wolters ideas on how players should sell at ICM (or even at a discount to ICM) in deep runs to maximize bankroll growth
dw.substack.com/p/the-point-…
Live grinder. Online when the schedule allows. ♠️
@bustuw72 shares his favorite place to play online. 💻
Wholeheartedly agree that volume is important. It doesn't matter how good you are at poker if you don't play and APPLY your edge.
Having said that, we run across a subset of players who grind TOO much - to the exclusion of other very basic and important things - for example a life outside of poker, setting aside time to study and improve etc. etc.
One risk is burning out, but a more crippling risk we've seen is players who end up getting depressed during downswings because their identity is so wholly wrapped up in playing poker / winning.
Usually we advise players to play at most 5 days a week, setting aside 2-3 hours for study on 1 of the days off, and staying away completely from poker the last day.
1) Volume Is King
One of the biggest mistakes poker professionals and aspiring ones make is simply not playing enough. “Never miss a Sunday” is a fun mantra, but that doesn’t allow you to skip other days of the week. MTTs are a high-variance format. Even great players can go through prolonged stretches where their results don’t reflect their ability. The great equalizer? Volume.
Every hand is another opportunity to realize your edge. The more you play, the more opportunities you get to see that edge translate into actual profit.
During this challenge, I played 562 tournaments (Excluding rebuys) in 6 days. For some MTT players, that’s an entire month’s worth of volume.
You can’t control short-term variance. But you can control how many opportunities you give yourself to overcome it.
Would really like to see this implemented across all major tournament series
The Venetian is the first poker room on the Las Vegas Strip to switch to slide dealing.
Instead of throwing cards across the table, dealers now slide them across the felt. The goal is to stop cameras from catching a quick glimpse of a card during the deal.
South Point was already using this method, but now The Venetian is bringing it to all 50 tables.
The WPT Fall Festival starts there on October 28. It’ll be the first major poker series on the Strip using slide dealing.
Poker rooms are changing how they deal just to keep the cards hidden.
Results don’t lie. But you have to track them first. 📊
@bustuw72 on how he uses @backerstats to keep every live session in one place. ♣️
🎁 2 months free for the Standard Backing community →
backerstats.com
The path to playing live starts here. ♠️
Aaron on ProPath Live, our staking program for live tournament players. 🏆
Banning any specific software (or not banning it) won't have big impacts on the games.
Their users will adapt - most will learn to play without it, some will change where they play, a few will find ways around any ban.
The underlying justification here seems silly, given that less than 3 years ago GG had a bona fide super-user scandal.
On the other hand, as far as we know they haven't had one in 3 years and maybe that's because they've actually improved security (or maybe just done a good job hiding it).
The underlying reasoning from GG is more about making it harder to play on multiple sites, which hurts their competitors by decreasing liquidity and further strengthening their market-share.
The software ban will jostle the equilibrium a bit between regs and recs and make it a little bit harder for smaller sites to maintain liquidity. But long term won't change too much.
GGPoker Security Update
We’re introducing new measures to protect our community, including new client security features and a ban on all third-party poker software and automation tools.
Full details here 👇
gg.gl/new-security
This is one of the use-cases of backing that gets missed.
This doesn't have to be an either-or situation and can be a yes-and situation with backing.
Most live players grind alone. ♠️
@bustuw72 didn’t.
Buy-ins covered. Schedule built together. A team behind every event.
That’s ProPath Live.
From applying to actually playing. ♠️
@dajerseyboy on what joining ProPath Live, our staking program for live tournaments, really looks like.
Every serious player has one tool they won’t play without. 🧠
For @bustuw72, it’s @GTOWizard.
Study off the table. Execute on it. ♠️
💰 Exclusive for the Standard Backing community:
Use code STANDARDGTO at checkout and get 10% off your first GTO Wizard purchase, applied instantly.
→ gtowizard.com
Some of the comments on our warning post earlier this week boil down to "why are you posting this."
The answer comes down to a cultural difference between online and live poker.
In online poker it has been standard since the mid-2000's to post about people that steal or scam from others in the poker community. On 2+2 there was a thread with thousands of posts.
The reason it's standard practice online is that it's common for the community to work with people across borders and continents and you don't know who the person will target next. So you want the information to be widely available to protect the community as a whole.
Compare that to live poker - particularly in the US - where relationships tend to be very personal and built over years. Which leads to a reluctance by people to alert the public and instead alerting just those they think might get targeted.
In the US we've had a couple of cases where others came to us privately after we posted about a player and said "he stole from me too", and when we asked why they didn't alert others their answer was along the lines of they were concerned that it would tarnish their own reputation.
We want to bring the same model that exists in online MTT poker to live MTT poker. Namely that players can find funding based on their skills and track-record rather than based on who their friends are.
We think that there's many competent poker players without access to the funding they need to pursue their goals - and our goal is to fill this niche.
As we work with more and more players in the live MTT space we acknowledge that we will get stolen from - and we will let the community know so that others can avoid those individuals.
We'd appreciate it if the rest of the community did us the same service.
‼️ A warning to the poker community‼️
Erik Lee Macias owes us $8.1k
We started working with @blueheffner14 on June 4, 2026, and everything went smoothly for the first two months.
At the end of August, Erik played the @msptpoker Bally’s Colorado Championship where he finished 4th for $48.9k.
Following this win he paid us a $20k, a majority of what he owed us and continued holding $5.6k of our funds.
On September 14, he stopped responding to our messages. Then after 8 days without any communication, he finally replied on September 22, claiming that he had broken his phone in Black Hawk and had only recently gotten a new one.
He told us he had played additional events and would send the receipts shortly and we talked about upcoming events at MSPT Milwaukee on September 23.
He then stopped responding again.
We requested that our funds be returned and, after receiving no response, we reviewed his results on Hendon Mob. We discovered that he hadn't reported 3 cashes.
After accounting for these results and the other outstanding funds, Erik Macias currently owes us $8,170.
After many many attempts at reaching him (including having 3rd parties reach out to him on our behalf), he sent us an email saying:
“I’ve been going through a really difficult time personally and have had some life-changing events happen that I’ve been trying to deal with. I have zero funds currently.
I know avoiding the situation wasn’t the right way to handle it. I understand from your email that if I didn’t respond, you planned to put the situation on Twitter. Whatever you guys ultimately decide to do regarding that, it doesn’t change my responsibility. I still intend to make right on what I owe.”
However, he ignored our request to do a phone call to fully understand the situation and come up with some sort of repayment plan.
At this point, we see no other alternative than to make this public so other players and the community at large can make informed decisions before working with him.
We'll update this once we're hopefully repaid.
See the comment below for links to IG, hendonmob etc.
More identifying details on Erik Macias:
Name: Erik Lee Macias
Location: Cheyenne, Wyoming - USA
Email: [email protected]
Instagram:
instagram.com/blueheffner14/
Twitter: @blueheffner14
Hendonmob:
pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/pla…
Link to our blacklist page:
standardbacking.com/blacklis…
Jackpot KOs are a bit different than mysteries in that they add money to other mtts that are running throughout the schedule. Compared to mysteries which tend to suck money from other mtts (by pulling players).
That should incentivize sites to push them more across the schedule as way to boost liquidity.
There's going to be an absolutely massive shift on GG to this format over the next 6-18 months. Pokerstars and other competitors will likely be rolling it out once they see how successful they are.
The shift will be similar to that from non-bounty MTTs to PKOs a few years back. That shift resulted in the current schedules that are made up of ~70% PKOs + mysteries.
Backing provides leverage and acts similarly to an unsecured loan for an extremely high-risk activity.
It creates a path for players to ladder up when they may not have the resources or know-how to reach their goal themselves.
To answer some of your questions @DaraghDavey from the Marrakech @unibet open stream where Tunisianking finished 3rd for ~$31k:
- we're US-based and work with players all around the world.
- Our players get bonuses for wearing Standard Backing branded gear at live FTs, so you'll likely be seeing them a lot more