Diversifying Your Poker Income: The What, Why & How

I’m sure most of you have heard the saying, don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. If you haven’t, what it means is that you don’t want to rely on or put all of your effort into any one thing. Because if that one thing fails, you’ll be left with nothing.

An on going example of this is investing in the stock market. If you invest in one company and they go bankrupt, you lose whatever you invested. However, if you invest in 2 companies and one goes bankrupt, you only lost half of your money.

This example, of course, is over simplified. There’s more to investing than that. But what you need to take from it is that you shouldn’t ever focus only on one thing in the long run. This will apply to us poker players, too.

Poker players need to diversify just as much, if not more than anyone else. I mean, look at the game we play.

The number one reason poker players should diversify is to reduce their swings. If you’re on a downswing, it hurts. But if you go on a downswing and you have an additional income, you won’t feel nearly as bad — or stressed. Eliminating these negative feelings can also help reduce the amount of time you’re on your downswing.

Another reason to diversify is because poker is an active or working income. In other words, if you don’t play, you don’t get paid. So if you can find some sort of investment or other way to diversify your income that’s passive, you’ll be able to take breaks or vacations and not have to worry about there being a lack of money coming in.

There are a number of ways poker players can diversify their income.

Coaching

Coaching is the most common way poker players diversify their income, whether they know that’s what they’re doing or not. This is definitely an active income — you need to be active in coaching (hourly or per hand history) or you don’t get paid.

But depending on your skill level, how well you’re known and the stakes you play, you can charge $50 to $250 per hour. If you’re popular and make videos for a coaching site, you can probably charge upwards of $500-$1,000.

As you can imagine, it doesn’t take too long before you’re making a livable income. Especially when it’s in addition to your poker earnings.

Create Training Videos

Another option is to create training videos. There are a couple of ways to do this.

If you create videos for a poker website or training site, you’ll likely be paid on a per video basis. This is also an income that requires you to trade your time for money. On the bright side, you can charge more per video since it’s not just your knowledge you’re charging for, but the technical difficulty in creating a video, as well as the novelty.

If you want a passive income, an option to consider is making videos and posting them to your own site. What you would do is charge a monthly fee to access the library of videos. Or you can charge a smaller fee on a per video basis — something like $4.99 or $9.99 per download.

You can do the same thing with PDFs/ebooks if you don’t want, or are unable to create a video.

Poker Staking

Poker staking is another common, and very popular way to diversify income. It’s very similar to investing in stocks, but instead you’re investing in players. There are two ways to go about staking, and both are along the lines of passive income.

One way is to just invest in whoever you deem profitable. This is the most ‘passive,’ as all you really need to do is some research (to make sure the player is profitable) and then send them money. If they win, they’ll send you your profits. To make it completely hands off, make someone a manager of your funds and allow them to invest as they see fit. You’ll make less profit this way, but you’ll keep your time — which can then be used to make money.

The other way is to have your own stable, where you coach and fund other players. While there is a little bit more work (you need to coach them periodically), there is significantly more money to be made since you’ll have a bigger cut of the profits, which is to compensate for the coaching.

These are the most common ways to diversify your income as a poker player. A really good example of someone who does this well is, James “Split Suit” Sweeney. Check his site out, including his coaching, leakfinder, the tank and products pages to see the different ways (active & passive) he makes money.

And as I mentioned, these are just the most common ways — there are plenty more, especially if you’re willing to get creative. You can invest in stocks/metals, start a business on the side, create websites and earn money from advertisements or even charge players to subscribe to your blog (where you provide tips). The possibilities to earn money, while diversifying your income, is unlimited as a poker player.