Michael Girdley

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Sunday, April 22, 2007

Is Team PokerStars any good?

After watching ELKY donk off more money than I can count, I became curious if he and other "Team PokerStars" pros and amateurs are winning players. SharkScope.com allows me to see their tournament results:

Name Games Av. Profit Av. Stake Av. ROI Total $
ElkY 14,396 -$12 $605 2% -$171,518
Exclusive 426 -$136 $812 -7% -$58,130
FossilMan 142 -$202 $771 -8% -$28,731
Bill Chen 160 -$167 $654 -24% -$26,650
Humberto B. 76 -$295 $490 -41% -$22,403
JoeHachem 36 -$103 $618 35% -$3,693
VictorRamdin 236 -$15 $694 -5% -$3,458
NoMercy 50 -$42 $101 -26% -$2,120
Wil Wheaton 223 -$1 $13 -5% -$295
LadyMaverick 112 -$1 $215 -8% -$166
Katja Thater 20 -$2 $17 -24% -$47
LucaPagano 171 $N/A $N/A -13% $N/A
John Duthie 131 $N/A $N/A -25% $N/A
stevejpa 142 $1 $27 101% $175
Money800 360 $2 $390 1% $811
LeeNelsonP* 209 $18 $241 8% $3,693
barryg1 125 $33 $1,639 0% $4,036
Tom McEvoy 242 $27 $134 12% $6,523

This only reflects tournaments and no cash game results.

Why is the supposed PokerStars All-Star team a bunch of net losers? From a PokerStars company standpoint, it's not a bad idea to have featured players be a bunch of donkeys. If the "best" are losing money in buckets, why wouldn't they give some of it to you? As a student of the game, this gang is a poor set of role models.

As for the biggest loser, Elky, he has a very interesting combination of postive ROI but a negative total profit. From what I've seen of his play, he's playing out of his class too often and opponents in those tougher games do a better job of exploiting his weaknesses. His play is questionable mainly due to
multi-tabling up to 12 tables at a time such that he appears to not be doing much except playing his cards. At lower limits with weaker competition, that can work. But a $2,200 1-table SNG, no one is going to make enough obvious mistakes to his style anything but a losing proposition.

Word to the wise: Avoid Barry Greenstein and McEvoy and hope to land Bill Chen at your tournament table!

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