Week In Review #55 April 19th-April 25th 2026
How To Lose $50,000,000. Step 1: Play $48,000,000 in poker tournaments.
Earlier this week Dylan Linde shared his story of selling action to David Peters and how he “deeply regrets doing business with [him]”. A classic response, that I saw from anonymous Twitter randoms who don’t seem to understand how the economics of tournament poker work, but also some more high-profile individuals, was to post a screenshot of David Peters’s Hendon Mob page showing he had “Total Live Earnings” of just shy of $50 million and wondering how he could have blown it all. First of all, blowing $50 million is hard to do, but hardly unprecedented. Nicolas Cage blew $150 million mostly on bad real estate investments in post-Katrina New Orleans, but also on buying dinosaur skulls and other artifacts. Evander Holyfield, Mike Tyson, and Allen Iverson all filed for bankruptcy and they all earned north of $150 million (Tyson and Holyfield likely got scammed by promoters, but that’s still a lot of money to lose). And that’s before I start mentioning the billions lost by people like Bernie Madoff and Sam Bankman-Fried.
These posts are stupid because David Peters did not blow $50,000,000. David Peters had a live poker business, which over a 20-year period, made a total of $50M in revenue. Revenue, earnings or winnings does not equal profit, but as I wrote about before, they are an okay number to use for a public scoreboard that tracks results in high-stakes tournaments. David’s business had a lot of revenue, but a lot of expenses and his main expense was not flights or hotels or quarter-zip sweaters, but tournament buy-ins.
David started playing Super High Rollers in 2015 and has cashed for ~$43 million since then. Let’s say he had very good results and had a 10% ROI and never sold or swapped. That would mean he put in $39 million in buyins over 10 years (I am not counting 2020 or 2026) and profited ~3.9 million. I am ignoring online results or investments (although given his current situation, I think it’s likely David did not make a lot of money investing). Making just under 4 million before taxes in a decade of work is not too shabby, but I hope this framing helps people realize this story is less “Fifty Million Dollar Man is a Deadbeat” and more “Partner at Mid-Level Law Firm Can’t Pay Debts.”
The other weird refrain I’ve seen is a version of, obviously he’s broke, he sells all his action, that $50M all went to his backers. First of all, as discussed above, $50M is closer to $4M. Second, in the long run, it’s rather hard for backers to make a lot of money while a horse makes very little money. Generally if there is an asymmetry it is that the backer loses a lot of money, while the horse might lose small, break even, or even make money. If making money backing people in SHRs was so easy that someone like Peters was making his backers seven figures a year, you’d see a lot more people lining up to buy action. Selling action is a way for a poker player to reduce the amount of risk they are taking; the people who go broke tend to increase the amount of risk they are taking. I am sure you, the reader, has done something like lost $1000 playing $10 tournaments; well, it’s basically just as easy to lose $1M playing $10k tournaments or $10M playing $100k tournaments. That’s why it’s necessary to swap, sell action or take other measures to mitigate your risk. If you are post facto trying to determine how a tournament poker player went broke, it’s always much more likely they were taking too big a piece of themselves than too small of one. It’s very unlikely that anyone made others a ton of money but made very little themselves.
Hendon Mob pages have their use, but determining how much money any individual made is not one of them. Whether it’s spending, bad investments, or a bad run in gambling, it’s very easy to blow a lot of money if you are firing big enough. If you are trying to count someone’s net worth and aren’t counting taxes or expenses, you are likely overestimating how much money they have. As someone who has always liked David and found him easy to deal with in our limited business dealings, this story is sad to see. Hopefully he will be able to honour his promise of “making things right and trying to regain the trust of the community”. Time well tell if he does, but for now I felt it was necessary to correct some of the knee-jerk reactions from people who didn’t understand what was going on.
If you aren’t a paid subscriber, you might have missed POTD #268 that is because I misclicked and sent the post out to paid subscribers. If you’d like to read POTD #268, click the link above (or become a paid subscriber so something like this never happens again).
Additional Sims For Premium Subscribers
Premium Subscribers are given access to a Google Drive folder where they will also be able to download the raw files of sims I used to write my POTDs, sims that are more accurate and appropriate than equivalent sims in the big public libraries. This week I uploaded
A PIO ICM sim for POTD #270
A PIO sim that tests lead sizes and a node locked one for POTD #271
A PIO ICM sim for POTD #272
Additional Analysis for Premium Subscribers
Everyday Premium Subscribers get an extra bit of analysis not included on Substack. Today, I’ll share #onemorething from POTD #272, where I wrote about how a key part of the hand was how ace heavy my preflop range is.
POTD #272 #onemorething
One of the keys to this hand comes from the fact that David pure folds the flop with T9 without a backdoor flush draw. It’s not a great hand, but you’d think third pair with a bad gutshot would be enough to continue vs a CO c-bet. The reason it doesn’t is rather simple, his straight draw is terrible. The highest EV turns in the deck for me are the offsuit queens, which makes sense, I have the nuts a lot. Queen’s are so good for my range that the Qc is the fourth highest equity turn for me, despite having a large flush disadvantage. The only higher EV turns are the three offsuit queens. I have a lot of Ax, when I don’t have Ax, I have big cards. The only hands I have with two undercards to a T are 66-99. On a blank turn I regularly bet those pocket pairs.
So what that means is on an ace river, Tx and Jx and Kx are rarely best for David. T7 has 7% equity and never wins at showdown, J7 has 10% and never wins at showdown, and K7 has 15% and has 3% pot share if it goes check-check. If I have a pocket pair, I often bet it on the turn and if the river is an ace, every single unpaired combo I have makes top pair. David can only fold T9 on the flop because my ICM conscious preflop range has so much Ax in it that it kills the value of his gutshot. Conversely David can bluff T7 on the ace river because he has so little showdown because I river a better pair so often. When considering if David could bluff medium pairs on the river, I should have realized that I river top pair 38%(!) of the time myself and that bluffing hands that block my potential two pair and can’t win is a shrewd play from him.
Media
I spent much of this week listening to music by Boards of Canada, a band that I knew was critically acclaimed, but knew very little about; I did not even know they were Scottish, not Canadian. Readers of POTD know I like writing while listening to ambient or electronic music that is, for lack of a better word, chill. Their music fits the bill and I believe their albums will remain in heavy rotation for me. [Music Has the Right to Children is a classic, but I like all of the first three albums quite a bit. -ed]
Sunny Mehta had his first press conference as the General Manager of the New Jersey Devils and gave some good quotes about poker, but more so decision-making in general. It’s worth your time to read one here and one embedded below.
As always, I can be reached on