Poker Players Association research on wittingly unprofitable stake share purchases in the GGPoker network clients

Video version of this text:

Chapter 1. Introduction

The GGPoker network is the most popular legal place to play online poker in the world right now. Thousands of tournaments with buy-ins ranging from the lowest to the highest, tens of thousands of players and hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money played out daily.

And in almost every tournament, a player can sell a share of the buy-in using the functionality built into the client. To do this, you need to go to the tournament lobby and select the player at the bottom right from whom you want to take a percentage.

For those who do not know what backing is, let us quickly explain. Let's say you want to take 50% from player X in a $10 tournament. You pay $5 before the game starts, and if player X gets into the prize zone, you receive 50% of the amount of prize money he received. If the player does not win the prizes, you lose your investment.

The main parameters for assessing a player when purchasing shares are his ROI and mark-up. These two values are continuously connected, if the mark-up set by the player is higher than his ROI, it means that you are buying a share from him that is wittingly unprofitable.

Mark-up is also paid by the backer before the start of the game. In our example with a $10 tournament and a mark-up of 1.2, the backer must pay not $5, but $6 for a 50% share - but he will be able to claim the same 50% of the potential prize money.

The Poker Players Association has done a big research to try to figure out how profitable it is to buy shares from players in the GG client. To do this, we found almost 500 players who most often sell shares in tournaments, we collected data on the coefficients(i.e., mark-ups) that these players set, we collected data on the results of these players using the SharkScope service. This service allows you to track the performance of almost any player in online tournaments. Since September 2023, the GGPoker network got rid of possibility to track player results in its tournaments, so the data in this research is taken until September 2023.

We also collected data on results of the entire set of players and divided them into three categories: weak regular, average reg and strong reg in selected tournaments. This is necessary in order to correlate their results with the coefficients set by selling players in these tournaments.

And at the end you will find a short essay on the impact of the SharkScope ban on the GG network on the sale/purchase of shares. Let's get into it.

Chapter 2. Table

We decided that the material from this video should be available to everyone, so we compiled all the data into a Google spreadsheet, the data in which will be updated: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1utL20jGAIkU0ahDbXGR2FN0phdqEGDaLqzEHOAQIKu8/edit#gid=0

The data in the table is for tournaments with buy-ins of $49 and above on the GGPoker network.

MU data page

On the MU data page you can find the nicknames of players who sell shares more often than others (column A). Column B summarizes their overall average mark-ups. Column D displays the total amount for which a particular player sold shares. For example, player Timothy Ulmer sold $1.6 million worth of shares. Just above in this column you can see the total sales of all 476 players we researched.

The following columns provide tournament-specific data. For example, in columns H-J there are figures for the Daily Main tournament for $54. Line 2 shows the average markup at which the entire set of players sells shares in this tournament - 1.33. Lines 3 and below describe the mark-ups for each specific player. The %Sold column shows how much interest the player sells in the specified tournament. Only the percentage of completed sales is indicated here; if a player tried to sell 80%, but only 49% were bought from him, exactly 49% will be indicated in the cell.

Let's immediately pay attention to an interesting example from line 24.

A player with the nickname “Internecik”, having sold 49% of the tournament for $54 with a coefficient, that is, a mark-up, of 2, practically guaranteed himself free participation in the tournament: for a share of 49% with such a mark-up, a potential backer would have to pay $52.92. In order for a backer to turn such a share purchase into a plus, the “Internecik” player must have an ROI of more than one hundred percent in this tournament, which seems a bit unrealistic.

The next AVG seller profit column shows how much a player on average earned from each of his sales in a particular tournament. These three columns need to be read together: on average, 53% of shares were sold in the Daily Main tournament for $54 with a mark-up of 1.33, and each player who sold immediately earned $9.54 on average. This is general data; specific players will have different results.

The same data will be collected from a larger pool of tournaments, but in this video we will focus on only three events: Daily Main for $54, Big Game for $210 and Bounty Hunter for $525.

 Results Total Page

The next page of our document is called Results Total. The first four columns duplicate the information from the previous page. Column H is responsible for the players' net profit in dollars, column I shows the sum of all entries that the player made into sold tournaments, the Total Buy-in column displays the sum of all buy-ins, in column K you will see the average buy-in for the specified player, and in the ROI column you can see its ROI. The higher the numbers in this column are above zero, the better the player performs.

We obtained the data for this page using the SharkScope service, which since September 2023, backers can no longer use to analyze those players from whom they are going to buy shares.

 Results Top Sellers Page

Next page - Results Top Sellers. There we see the same columns as on the previous page, but the data here is for the 50 best-selling players on the GGPoker network. Please note: the top 50 most selling players sold shares worth $2.7 million, while the entire pool of players included in the table sold shares worth $5.02 million. So, the top 50 sellers sold more of their action than the other 420 players combined . In addition, as you can see from columns B and K, top sellers offer shares with higher mark-ups than everyone else, but at the same time show a significantly lower ROI.

Summary page

The last page of our table is Summary. Here are the most interesting figures in the context of the entire study.

In the top table you see the most important general data.

Column C of line 3 shows the average mark-up for the entire set of tournaments, and column D of line 3 contains the average mark-ups for the three tournaments that interest us. The next four columns display the same data as on the previous pages.

Now let's look at the most important table, lines 10-14.

In the Average Mark-up total column we see the mark-up for a specific tournament that players set, for example 1.39 for the Daily Main for $54, 1.16 for the Big Game for $210 and 1.13 for the Bounty Hunter for $525.

The Total reg Results ROI column contains data on the entire set of regulars - their ROI in a particular tournament. The weak, the strong - all together.

The next three columns already have a breakdown into three categories of players: weak regulars (weak reg results), average regulars (mid reg results) and top regulars (top reg results) in a particular tournament.

The sample column displays the number of entries that players have made.

How to understand this table: for example, in the $54 Daily Main tournament, the total pool of players showed an ROI of 12.6%, with weak regulars showing 4% ROI, average - 18%, top regulars - almost 29%.

What immediately catches your eye: there is a category of weak regulars who simply don’t beat tournaments for $210 and $525, they play them straight into the red, and in a tournament for $54 they show an ROI of 4%, which is very mediocre, to put it mildly.

Average regulars have a slight advantage: in the $54 Daily Main they have a good ROI, but in the other two tournaments they have so-so. Finally, the top regulars are tearing up the $50 tournament, playing the $210 tournament a little profitable , and doing well in the $525 bounty tournament.

The main point of this table: potential backers should not be too concerned about ROI without reference to mark-ups. If we look at the Average Mark-up Total columns, we see that the average coefficients set by players in the $54 Daily Main tournament is 1.39. So, for a zero purchase, the backer needs the player to show 39% ROI. And the results of even the top regulars in this tournament are 28%, not to mention the average and weak regs.

This means that if every player on our list was a top regular, then you, as a backer, would obviously buy shares of minus 11% (the difference between the column indicators).

The next table on this page shows the difference in required ROI between the player's set coefficient and his displayed ROI.

As you can see, buying a share from a weak regular at $54 Daily Main will result in a minus 34% ROI. We see the smallest discrepancy in the data here among the top regulars in Bounty Hunter for $525: on average, players set a mark-up 1.13, and show 10.54% ROI in the tournament. That is, if you buy only from top regulars with such a coefficient, you are still buying a share that is wittingly unprofitable.

And finally, the table in lines 5-8 contains the same data, but already converted into real money. From this table you can find out that the average profit for a player selling shares in a tournament for $525 will be $39.06.

Chapter 3. Conclusions

As mentioned above, from September 2023 the GGPoker network stopped providing data to the SharkScope service. And the further we get from this date, the less relevant the data on players will become.

Previously, each potential backer could analyze the history of a player’s performance in different tournaments and decide whether to buy or not to buy a share. Now, when purchasing a share in a client of the GGPoker network, the backer does so essentially blindly. And taking into account the data we collected on the field, we can conclude that, probably, the vast majority of purchases are wittingly unprofitable for the buyer.

Chapter 4. What's next?

The head of the Russian skin of the GGPoker network the PokerOK room, Ivan Bryksin, in his posts on the GipsyTeam forum, has repeatedly stated that the GGPoker network plans to prohibit backing outside the game client, having developed technical changes to the client for this purpose, as well as initiating a ban on backing outside the client in the Rules and Conditions of Use. We don't know how exactly this will be implemented from a technical point of view.

We decided to publish this research and this video to warn the poker community. We encourage you to be more responsible when purchasing shares within the GGPoker client. Probably, the vast majority of proposals for the sale of shares within a client are wittingly unprofitable for the buyer, because the coefficients that players set are simply not technically achievable in the current meta, as evidenced by massive data samples from Sharkscope.

We, the Poker Players Association, believe that the global poker community can still influence the direction of development of the industry as a whole, and its monopolist in particular. So far, we see that the path that the GGPoker network has chosen is not aimed towards transparency and purity of the game, does not lead to maintaining the notorious poker ecology, but rather the opposite.

But there is always the opportunity to change the course.