Written By: Al Neipris for RakeBackNation.com
I was still relatively new to internet poker when someone I’d met on the 2+2 poker forum asked me if I had any interest in becoming a prop. He was a smart, super-aggressive young player whom I’d been corresponding with on the finer points of limit strategy, and I had all the respect in the world for him. He was just one of those guys with an obvious gift for the game. By virtue of a bedroom full of computer monitors and I’m guessing, an occasional Ritalin boost, he was playing as many as 8 tables at a time, and despite the fact he was playing no higher than 3-6 I had no trouble believing him when he told me he was taking down a 100k a year. After he confessed that he was only 17 years old and playing on his older brother’s account, I was even more impressed. When I was 17, I was still sucking my thumb. If he thought poker propping was a good deal, I was interested.
He explained via e-mail, no doubt in between capping it up at all eight tables while doing his algebra homework, that a prop’s general function is to play at sites that don’t get a lot of traffic, so that when customers do show up they’ll be more likely to have someone to play with. Naturally, there’s nothing worse for a poker site than a lack of players. Payment is usually in the form of rakeback, often as much as 100 percent and occasionally even more.
This sounded good to me. If you’re new to the game and haven’t been paying much attention to just how much you‘re forking over in rake every month, especially if you’re playing limit, I suggest installing poker tracker or some such software to see just how expensive it is. At the lower limits, say anything under 3-6, it’s often literally impossible to be a long term winner, so onerous is the house‘s cut. This is no different than live poker of course, but online you’re playing so many more hands that the raw numbers add up very quickly, all the more so if you’re multi-tabling.
Suddenly that 100k my young friend was making sounded just a little less impressive. By playing all those tables at once, he was effectively guaranteeing himself a huge income even with a no better than break even performance as a poker player.
Like any job if course, propping has its drawbacks. A good prop’s most important role is to start games, and some players aren’t comfortable with shorthanded and heads up play. Then too, perhaps even more significantly, a prop must give up his independence, and in my experience poker players tend to be an independent breed. A prop must play at sites he ordinarily might not play at, at tables and against players he might not otherwise choose.
Also, depending on the site, there are usually seating rules to follow, like the requirement to leave a table when it fills up, or limits on the number of props allowed in any one game. Such rules are not difficult to follow, but they can be annoying, especially for those players who quite rightly put a lot of emphasis on table and seat selection. Such a player might be understandably reluctant to trade a table full of passive fish, especially if he’s got a strategically advantageous seat, for an extended game of heads-up with some fiercely aggressive prop.
But I decided to give it a try. By that time in my online career, I was putting in anywhere between 15 and 20 hours a week at the tables, and the chance to recover all that rake seemed too good to pass up. I hadn’t played much heads up before, in fact almost none, but I had confidence in my general skills as a poker player and had always thought of myself as a quick learner.
Looking back, it’s kind of absurd, how nervous I was. My main concern was that I’d be playing shorthanded against other props, and I just assumed they’d all be strong players, an assumption that quickly proved to be false. But it wasn’t just that. Suddenly, this vaguely illicit source of extra income had been elevated to the status of semi-respectable employment. It just felt funny to me, like I’d gone straight or something. Sitting at home in front of my computer that first day in my customary shorts and tee shirt, I suddenly had the feeling that I should get up and put on a tie.
Necessary poker skills aside, the job of propping itself is about as mentally challenging as bagging groceries, and yet I have to admit that things did not go smoothly at first. In those days, it was common for the host site to require shift managers whose role it is to direct prop traffic and just generally make sure that seating rules are being followed. The first site I propped at actually paid by the hand, a different arrangement than the usual rake back, and they had a rule that props were not allowed to play heads-up with each other. At first this made no sense to me, but after I thought about it a little, a light went on. Unethical props (I know, I know, hard to believe), could simply trade blinds back and forth, thus generating no rake for the site while getting paid at the rate of 100+ hands an hour. Nice work if you can get it, but not too good for the house.
I logged on that first day and notified the shift manager I was ready to play. Since there were no other seats available, he directed me to an empty 5-10 table to wait for customers. In short order I had one, or thought I did anyway, and I was off and running. But after a couple of minutes I got a frantic instant message from the shift manager demanding to know what I thought I was doing, playing heads up with another prop. I took another look at the list of props I’d been given, and sure enough there was his name. So anxious had I been that I’d somehow missed it. It was an important rule I’d inadvertently broken, one of the two or three written in bold print, so you couldn’t possibly miss it, and for a minute or two I thought my propping career was over before it had even begun.
I wish I could say I’ve not broken any rules since, but we’re all human and I’m sure I’ve made a few more unintentional mistakes along the way. Still, I give it my best effort. Propping’s been good to me over the years, affording a decent income for doing pretty much what I’d be doing anyway. As to the young friend who first suggested I give it a try, I lost track of him not long afterward, which is too bad because I’ve never had the chance to properly thank him. But the world of Internet poker often seems a shadowy, insubstantial place in a constant state of flux, sites coming and going, multitudes of anonymous, faceless players and sometimes even those we’ve come to think of as friends, appearing and then disappearing at the speed of light, like so many virtual ghosts.
But the money’s real. Oh yes, the money’s real.
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