Thanks for the link ...
I've played enough poker (only online, in my case, and a few years ago) to find the whole subject interesting.
You'd want to choose your players pretty carefully, for backing them, wouldn't you?
Is it excessively cynical of me to have the instinctive reaction "If you're such a safe investment, as a poker player, why do you need backing in the first place: why not play in smaller games and work your way up steadily?"
I suspect the analogy here, between futures trading and poker (or - if you like - between firms like TST and poker backers like the guy interviewed in the article) is that with poker there are
big games, small games and in-between games: there isn't an equivalent of the effective "minimum stake requirement" for trading futures.
For futures trading, regardless of your skills, you really do need some minimum capital of your own, which for people in countries such as Ukraine (I choose this example only because TST funds several people there) is extremely hard to amass. The same isn't true of poker games, where people can literally start with an amount as small as $200, play in very low stake games (or $5/$10 STT's and coolers, as I used to) and work their way up. So this is a significantly different "market", in that sense, I think?
My own experience of building my way up through $5/$10 STT/cooler poker games was ultimately unsuccessful - I
was steadily and repeatedly profitable in those games, after reading "all the books", but however many times I worked my way up enough to play in $20/$25 games, I was never profitable in those, against different oppontents. I lacked the skills (and ultimately, to be honest, the interest) to survive at a higher level.
