Back in May you might remember I decided to take $250 from the Sunk Costs Are Irrelevant coffers and “invest” it in a poker player. Well, the experiment is over. Here’s how it turned out.
The single share I bought was spread across multiple events so there was some diversification involved, and the kicker was that it included the World Series of Poker entry. Here are my learnings from this:
- In poker, for me, it is clearly far less painful for me to watch someone else losing my money than it is for me losing it all by myself. I like I hired a pro to lose my money for me, and he did a grand job of it.
- It is pretty entertaining to read the write-ups and follow him on Twitter, but there is a lot of poker acronyms I don’t know about.
- Diversification across tournaments helps, but diversification across players may also be useful.
- Despite the return, he probably performed better than I would have if I had just kept my cash and played in local table games. And, I didn’t have to spend those hours sitting around drinking beer. Instead, my family and I have share a lot of quality time playing a lot of Settlers of Catan and some Blokus. If you don’t know these games you should check them out.
So, what was the return? He came close to cashing in a couple of tournaments making the final day of most, but in the end he only cashed in 1. Once it was divvied up, my share earns me $25 or a -90% return. Ha!
I need another new alternative investment to try out. It’s way too long before the NCAA basketball tournament!