PokerShares is a website where users can bet on poker players. The site also offers odds on poker related events and poker props. I noticed recently PokerShares being mentioned by a bunch of people in the poker community including Daniel Negreanu, so below is an initial review of the PokerShares.
It seems like PokerShares offers users the ability to bet using fixed odds on a large variety of poker players in a number of tournaments. It also seems like this is not a marketplace of odds, so users are betting against the house (in this case PokerShares) instead of each other.
I signed up for the site, and new users are required to submit a bunch of personal information such as their name, address, phone number, and e-mail address. This seems like a lot of information to give to some site I’m just learning about, but I submitted the signup forms, and received a confirmation e-mail. After I confirmed my e-mail and logged into the site, a message was displayed asking me to confirm my identity by sending PokerShares a copy of my passport. They warn that if I do not confirm my identity in 14 days, that my account will become inactive.
After logging in, I scroll over to the 2018 WSOP main event page and I can see a long list of players offered. I notice some big names such as Phil Ivey are listed, but they don’t have other players such as Justin Bonomo listed for the WSOP main event. There are four columns listed in the table of players that users can bet on: their name, markup, price/1%, and % available. Using the price of Adrian Mateos as a guide, he is priced at a markup of 4.3 so his price per 1% is $430, and the book seems to be taking up to $20,000 worth of bets on him. A $10 bet on Adrian Mateos will pay $1,895.35 if he wins. This makes his implied odds = 10 / 1,895.35 = 189.50. These odds are implying an 0.527% chance that Adrian Mateos wins the main event.
If we assume the 2018 WSOP main event gets 7,000 entrants, then the raw likelihood of Adrian Mateos winning is 7,000. So with odds of 190, it seems pretty expensive to bet on Adrian Mateos? Is Adrian Mateos that much better than the average player in the field? Maybe, I don’t know enough about WSOP main event odds to say.
At first glance, the way prices are set on PokerShares seems a bit convoluted, but I can see what they are going for. In poker, its common to invest and trade shares in players (and yourself) as a way to spread risk and raising money, so by presenting the betting as a way of “investing” in shares of poker players builds off this culture. On the other hand, the pricing format kinda obscures the information and makes it a bit more difficult to determine the odds.
If anyone has further comments on PokerShares, please post your comments below in the comments section, I would love to learn more about how this market works.
That’s an interesting option to test. Still, I prefer to play and not to watch someone playing and wait for the final. That’s much more satisfying to know that you can influence results.
Personally I am really bad at playing poker, so for me, it’s the only opportunity to win money from the poker matches,
me too, thats why I found this site fun 🙂