Its nice from the perspective that staking deals done on our own are always at risk of either being cheated or ripped off. So having the deals done right there in the poker client is super nice.
Having said that, I never do staking. From my own perspective, why would I want to share my winnings with anyone? Yes, I realize accepting a stake from an "investor" means I can "play higher", and playing higher buyins means winning more since prize pools are bigger... but it seems like a break-even thing, even if you do make a bigger cash, you have to give a significant percentage away to your backer. So it's really a wash, all you are doing is getting experience playing with better players, which is certainly worth something in the long term, but I have always believed it is better to "play on our own dime" and play at a lower level where the opposition isn't quite so good at poker. You'll cash more often at lower levels than you will at the higher stakes, so again, the entire thing seems like a wash (break-even) at best. My opinions obv, I'm quite conservative with
bankroll and money, just in general. Many players are the exact opposite from me, they love to "gamble" and take extra risks hoping to run their bankroll up quicker than I do... to each their own, as they say!!
Another problem is, ACR doesn't make it very easy to review past tournament results, they delete tournament lobbies one day after the tournament has finished, so there's no way on the site to see who is generating solid results and who isn't. Yes I realize there are "third-party sites" that do this, Sharkscope is one, but I don't pay for those sites and we only get a few free lookups each day if we don't pay. Also, third-party sites are not perfectly reliable, my own Sharkscope, for example, is missing quite a few of my results and isn't an accurate reflection of my play.
I think if ACR is going to push staking as legitimate, they need to provide us with some way to track the other players and see how they perform over time. Quite honestly, I think
poker sites do everything they can do to PREVENT third-party sites from "scraping" tournament results data, so from that aspect, it just doesn't make sense to leave it up to
Apps like Sharkscope, they need to provide it as a service themselves within the ACR client.
And a reminder (gotta get on my soapbox yet again)... ACR still has not fixed their hand history bugs (the final hand of tournaments often never gets recorded when the table breaks immediately after our bust-out hand ends), so if they aren't willing to fix that issue (its still not on their long-term update schedule as far as I can see), then why would they offer us player results for staking purposes? The entire staking thing is a mixed message, in my opinion, seems clear its just another profit motive for them, I assume there is a fee charged by the site for the "privilege" of being allowed to buy or sell a stake. Nothing is ever free in our world, we pay for it somehow. Like ALL corporations in our capitalist (or communist nowadays) world, there is only ONE motive for anything, and that motive is money (profit). If a corporation says they're doing something for our benefit, they're just trying to make themselves look good. Corporations have only ONE motive, all other motives are falsehoods designed to enhance their singular profit motive. There is no good will in the corporate world, if they pretend there is, they're doing it to suck people into their profit game without them realizing that's all it really is. There's a lot of this in the corporate world, "Oh look at how good we are at protecting the environment", for example... they NEVER care about that stuff because it costs them profit, but they love to pretend in order to fool the public into thinking they're a "good corporation". Public relations is critical to profiting, "putting on a good face", and that's what its always about.
