Hello. My name is Marc Karam, and the game of poker has made me a multimillionaire. I hope that someday it can do the same for you, and hopefully by sharing with you how I built my bankroll, when and why I changed stakes, what to expect as you move up, and what I am doing to make sure that I stay a multimillionaire, I can help you on your journey.
I started out almost six years ago playing micro-stakes home games and small local tourneys. In those early days, I wasn't necessarily a winning player, but I believed I was steadily improving. Eventually, I deposited some money online and started taking shots at building up a bankroll. I would deposit small amounts and play 50¢-$1. I would "go broke" and just reload. The money with which I was playing was not an actual poker bankroll; it was just an arbitrary amount with which I was able to gamble. Losing that money would in no way have been financially devastating to me. For that reason, I was able to play a given stakes with only three or four buy-ins in my account.
As I improved, I started to realize that many of the players with whom I was playing lacked even the most basic understanding of the game. After reading a lot about poker strategy and playing as often as I could, I finally was able to build one of my online deposits into a reasonable amount of money.
I started observing the higher-stakes games to see what the competition was like, and it appeared to me that the game was beatable. So, when I had a particularly good day and found myself up by considerably more than a buy-in for a higher-stakes game, I would take a shot. I set an escalating scale of "stop-losses," amounts at which I would quit the game. For example, if I built up my stack to $2,400 playing $2-$4, I would commit to stopping if I fell under $2,000 and guarantee myself a $1,600 profit. If I later got up to $3,500, I would commit to stopping at $3,000, and so on.
As the money grew, so did my stop-loss amount. I kept doing this until one day, I found myself with an $8,000 profit in my $5-$10 session. I took $5,000 and sat down at a $25-$50 table, knowing that if I lost my initial buy-in, I was still up $3,000 for the day. The money grew and grew until I was sitting with more than $55,000.
The truth is, I made that money because I went on a great run of cards. I was a good player, but I also got very lucky in order to be able to build up that much money that quickly. What's important about this story is not that I got lucky, but that I found a way to put myself in a position to get lucky without risking too much; I used the house's money and always gave myself a safety net in the form of stop-losses.
I used the same philosophy for tournaments by playing online satellite events. They are an excellent, low-risk way to put yourself in a position to get lucky. I won a satellite into the 2006
PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (
PSCA) and managed to cash there for $13,500. By that point, I had a bankroll of more than $100,000, and I started to find that I was consistently making more money playing poker than at my day job. So, when I won my way into the
PSCA, I asked for and got a six-month leave of absence from my job. I can't stress this enough: Poker is a game of swings and variance, so never put yourself in a position where you have nothing to fall back on.
With my $100,000 bankroll, I had enough money to play $5-$10 regularly, and I did for a while, but I discovered that my win rate at $5-$10 was lower than at $2-$4. I was playing a straightforward game, but it had become routine. I started getting bored and playing poorly. I decided that the solution was to move back down to $2-$4, and to compensate for the loss of revenue by playing multiple tables. Eventually, I was playing nine tables in the $2-$4 games online and making more money than when I played $5-$10. I never got bored because I always had a hand in play somewhere. Also, I found that at stakes of $2-$4 or lower, playing very straightforward, fundamental poker is enough to be profitable.
Poker is a game in which skill will trump luck only over the long run. By playing nine tables simultaneously for six hours a day, the "long run" came a lot sooner. I was averaging more than enough hands per day to completely mitigate the effect of luck, and I gained a lot of experience very quickly.
Soon, I managed to win a satellite into the 2006
European Poker Tour Grand Final in Monte Carlo. The experience I had gained from playing so many hands online helped me find my way to the final table of that event. I finished sixth and won $234,874. That finish got me noticed by Eurolinx Poker - a European online poker site - and I was offered a deal whereby I would be able to play in most major tournaments, effectively for free. I accepted the offer and managed to do very well in the tournaments I chose to play. I won $169,027 by making the final table of the 2006
World Poker Tour North American Poker Championships, and another $240,000 by making the final table of the 2007
Aussie Millions.
My biggest win came at the 2007
EPT Grand Final. I finished second and won $1.4 million. After that, I experimented with stakes as high as $200-$400 and found that the swings at that level were uncomfortably high, even with a multimillion-dollar bankroll. I also realized that I had made enough money to be set for life, and it made no sense to risk so much of it at a time. I took a substantial amount out of my bankroll and invested it in stable assets. I bought a new home for myself and my fiancée, and I made sure that my family was taken care of, leaving myself enough money to comfortably play the $50-$100 games while taking the occasional "shot" at higher stakes.
These days, people always ask me two main questions: "Do the players get better at the higher stakes?" and "Why don't you play in the biggest games available?" The answers are simple: There are good players and bad players at every level of stakes, but as you move up, the good players get better. And, I don't play super-high stakes because my number-one priority is making sure that I never go broke.
When you're dealing with millions of dollars, it's more than just your bankroll - it's your future. I always read about poker players who make millions and wind up penniless or in debt. I prefer a more cautious approach; put yourself in a position to get lucky, mitigate the risks by using stop-losses, and always remember to secure your future.
Marc "Myst" Karam is a Canadian poker pro who has won millions of dollars competing in major poker tournaments all around the world. Despite his tournament success, he makes his living primarily by playing online cash games on Eurolinx Poker at some of the highest stakes available.
