Poker Players are Mysterious

There are some poker players in the game today that have led very transparent lives. There are poker players like Helmuth and Brunson who have been so open about their lives and how they got to where they are today, that a perfect stranger could almost audit their entire playing histories.

Some of these players make it easy to tell where their money has come from because they took down a big tournament. Players like Jamie Gold and Joe Hachem, can show multi-million dollar bankrolls for poker simply because they each took down a huge tournament. Each of them had relatively successful day jobs, so they could bankroll themselves as well if they wanted to for cash games and other tournament play.

There are other players that have gone on the record as saying that they have investors when it comes to tournament play. They managed to garner a good reputation in the poker world as an earner and as such, may not ever have to front a buy in again. These kinds of deals I would imagine are pretty common in the poker world.

I would imagine that players like Chan and Brunson who have been playing for years and have grinded out very successful careers for themselves, must look at the younger generation in awe when realizing they just have to take down one big tournament now and instantly, they are in the game. The tournament pools were infinitely smaller when the old school masters started out on the circuit and so was the prize.

So what about all these young players whom we have never heard about? What about these players who come out of nowhere to participate in big tournaments or get invited to big cash games? Who are they? Where did their money come from? I often wondered about a few of the best players today and how young they were when they were starting out and yet they were playing on the world stage. There they were with big money going in and they were losing. How did these guys afford that before their corporate sponsorship kicked in? That stuff has always been interesting to me.

So I suppose this post is more of a question than anything else. For those of you out there who think you might have the answers, I would be curious to hear from you. Just to satisfy my own curiosity about how these players that apparently come out of nowhere are participating at the top levels. You can't tell me that each and every one of them is a descendant of the wunderkind Unger. So when you have some answers, let me know.