Trip Report - WSOP Main Event ICM Buying Fund
Details from my time buying action in Vegas, plus notes on the future of the market
This year for the Main Event I was determined to not just post ICM counts on X: I was also going to gamble on it. So I raised a fund of a cool million dollars and flew out to Las Vegas to meet players and make deals.
The ICM Buying Fund
The goal of the fund was to buy action in players at or near ICM value in the late stages of the tournament. This is a win/win situation for the player and the investor. The player realizes a portion of the full value of their stack, and the investor gets a fun sweat with a positive EV. The fund gets +EV positions mainly through buying strong players at face value, or breakeven players at a discount to ICM value.
The Investors
I spent about a week fundraising, and it went smoother than I expected. I was shooting for $500k-$1m total, of which I was contributing $100k. It took a number of tweets, a post in a trading group chat, and many referrals from my personal network, but I was able to raise the full $1m. The fund was actually oversubscribed, and I had to turn away investors that would have been a great fit. The investor base was split roughly 75:25 between backers and professional players, there were no investors from outside of the poker world.
After seeing how everything unfolded this year, I’m more confident than ever in the strength of the fund model for WSOP Main buying. We brought together a diverse and engaged group of investors from across the U.S., U.K., and Europe. Many went beyond capital—sharing valuable insights on player skill, flagging promising entrants, and even making warm introductions to players that were running deep. Their support played a real role in helping the fund identify and connect with key players.
Handicapping Players
A big part of my job was handicapping players each day. I started doing this in detail on Day 7, when the field got manageable with 57 players remaining. I don’t have an algorithm for estimating player edge, it’s all qualitative. The main source of information I use is thehendonmob.com, which shows a full record of all live tournaments cashed for each player. Then in cases where I don’t know a player, I will reach out to people I know from their state or country and get as much information as I can, including online results.
I won’t share any of my evaluations of player skill in this post, out of respect for the players. But each morning starting at 8am, I would use all of this information gathered and estimate an ROI for each player remaining in the tournament. This gave me a quick guide as to which players I should spend time pursuing, and a baseline I would reference in negotiations over what price to pay.
It’s important to keep in mind that ICM is just a starting point for getting to a fair price to pay for a piece of action. It’s a valuable baseline. But other factors including player skill, overall field strength, table strength, table position, and chip position are equally important for me to consider.
Total cashes from Hendonmob is also a blunt data point. The context of which tournaments the cashes came from, and over what period of time is very important to consider. For reference, here is a ranking I made on Day 7. It is not meant to be a ranking of player skill, but it helped me get a feel for each player’s experience, and let me know which players I had to dig deeper on to get a full estimation of their ROI for the rest of the tournament.
Connecting with Players
Then me and my group of investors would attempt to get in touch with these select few players by reaching out directly or getting a warm intro from a mutual friend. I would also run the ICM calculation for every player remaining and post it on X, and mention in a reply that I was interested in buying action. About half of the leads I got during the tournament came from cold outreach from these X posts.
Connecting with players was challenging. On Day 6 there were 202 people remaining - too many to handicap or reach out to individually. Here the popularity of my ICM posts helped a lot. On Day 7, we started reaching out directly to more players.
It was tricky for me balancing advertising the fund and giving offers while also respecting player’s privacy and time. The Main Event is a marathon tournament and it is extremely important for players to manage the small amount of time they have away from the table to socialize, recover, and take care of their basic needs. The last thing I wanted to do was interrupt a player’s routine or distract them from playing their game. I hope I was able to strike the right balance there.
Making Deals
OK, so how did it actually go? In the end I was able to buy $75,000 worth of action in total from three players. Two of these players sold to me on Day 6, and one on Day 7. Day 8 and the Final Table I wasn’t able to make any deals.
I’ll walk through one of the deals from Day 6 here, because Brandon Eisen the player I invested in was kind enough to let me share the details.
Brandon got a tip from one of my investors and reached out to me via Twitter DM late at night when play concluded on Day 4. He had made it through to Day 5 with a big stack, 2.24m chips which was worth $227k according to ICM and put him in 46th place of the 522 remaining players. The next morning, a few hours before Day 5 started I saw his message and we started a conversation over text.
Brandon is like most pros, he sold and swapped out a good amount of his action pre-tournament. But he was still looking to realize some of the upside of his $227k stack, and he told me he wanted to sell around 10%. It didn’t take long for me to decide I wanted to make a deal. Brandon has a strong track record in live tournaments over a long period of time, and he even shared other untracked results with me privately. It helped a lot that he had a good character reference from one of my investors. I also liked that he was chip leader at his table, and I thought he would have a nice edge on the remaining Main Event field. I made him an offer to buy 10% for $22,750, which is right at ICM value. But no deal was made.
Brandon liked his position in the tournament and wanted to let it ride. He told me that he appreciated the offer, but he was going to keep playing and contact me if he made Day 6.
This gamble paid off because he did make Day 6! And he even chipped up. The next morning Brandon and I resumed our chat, but now he was up to 3.25m chips, which is a $315k value according to ICM. Again I made him the same offer of face value, which was $31,500 for 10%.
Brandon accepted and we had a deal! Our conversation closing the deal ended at 11am, meaning cards would be in the air for Day 6 in less than an hour. I quickly wrote up a contract and made my way downstairs to the Horseshoe where the tournament would play out. Brandon arrived about ten minutes before play began, signed the contract, and we were set! That’s the full story of the first deal that I made.
In the end, Brandon busted out of the tournament five hours later in 113th place for a $70k cash. The fund was due back $7k from his cash, because I bought 10% for $31.5k. Meaning that overall, the fund lost $24.5k from this investment and Brandon profited $24.5k from the sale of 10% of his action on Day 6.
Brandon had about 50% of himself after pre-tournament selling and swapping. Then he sold 10% to the fund, leaving himself with 40%. His final profit from the tournament looks like this. $70k * .40 = $28k, less $4k from the tournament buyin = +$24k profit. Then add in the $24.5k profit he made from selling 10% to my fund on Day 6, you can see that he doubled his total profit from selling only a fraction of his remaining action in the late stages.
This sort of asymmetrical return in the median finish outcome is the reason selling at ICM value is so attractive to players. Brandon and I exchanged a few messages after his finish, and although he was disappointed coming up short in a big spot he was very happy that we made our deal. I felt the same way, even though the outcome was negative for the fund (-78% ROI). I am confident that it was a profitable investment, and I was very happy to make it.
The other two investments I made lost money as well, but we had a solid sweat leading up to the final table. The player I bought on Day 7 made it to Day 8 and the final 3 tables, but was quite unlucky in all-ins and busted there.
Post-Tournament Thoughts
Looking back on my week in Las Vegas I have mixed feelings. It was disappointing to only invest $75k (7.5%) of the total $1m that I raised. I was expecting Day 8 to be a big day, with many chances to make a buy in the $300k-$500k range, but that didn’t work out.
I am in the process of deciding whether or not it is worth it to continue to pursue investing in this market. I feel that the deals benefit both the player and investor, and I have heard a strong amount of support both online and among friends. But the reality of my experience this year has proven that the market is very small and there are still challenges for our community to work out if it is going to become a real thing.
Here’s a short list of things that stopped me from making deals this year. Awareness of the fund - not every player was aware that I was buying action, nor were they acquainted with me and comfortable doing business in the middle of the tournament. Selling/swapping pre-tournament - many players felt that they already sold and swapped so much that they were unwilling to sell any more. Emotions and willingness to gamble - going deep in the Main Event is incredibly intense, players tend to continue to bet on themselves after 5+ days straight of success rather than make a hedge that feels deflating.
With all that said, I was glad to make the three deals that I did. Even though the investments lost, I am very confident they were profitable in the long run and I know all of the players were happy with their decision to sell. The support and interest I received from the poker community was strong and it made me proud to be doing early work in a market that could eventually create a lot of value for the community. It was also just great to be back in Las Vegas amongst so many friends and peers.
That’s all for now! Look out for my next post here in about a week, where I will go in to more detail on the future of the fund and the ICM selling market. As always, please comment or reach out on Twitter/X with any questions.
If you or someone you know sold or bought action in the late stages of the WSOP Main I want to hear about it! Please reach out privately, any information about real deals in the market is valuable to me.