- Inaugural MacroSports conference at the Bellagio brings together poker and finance.
- MacroSports was founded by poker playing finance experts and hedge fund managers.
- Timex raised interest by describing the staking market as inefficient.
- “...probably the first early Sunday morning conference in the history of Las Vegas.”
The first topic for the inaugural MacroSports conference held at the Bellagio this week was macroeconomics and poker analytics. The conference brought together hedge fund managers and poker players to discuss areas of synergy.
“There’s always been this hidden nexus of what drives good poker players and good investors,” explained Reid Walker, Co-founder of MacroSports is and former hedge fund manager at Walker Smith Capital LP.
Conference attendees included Canadian poker pro Mike “Timex” McDonald, who invests heavily in staking other players. He told the conference that between 20% and 25% of the $62m in buy ins for last year’s WSOP Main Event was provided by backers like him.
The size and potential returns of this relatively obscure investment strategy proved of immediate interest to the financiers present. Last month McDonald caused a brief sensation by setting up a new twitter account @BankofTimex and announcing plans to offer odds on players in any tournament.
He rapidly realized that creating such a market was illegal under US law, but is still hunting for ways to improve the staking market: “It’s probably one of the least efficient markets I’ve seen and for one that’s this large, it seemed it would be beneficial to have it correct itself.”
Another Macro Founder will be familiar to pokerfuse readers. Well known for his High Stakes Poker appearances, Brandon Adams has taught at Harvard University and published books on behavioral finance and global economics.
His influence could be seen in the conference program. The topic of world debt and currencies joined other issues under discussion, including the art of reading behavior in poker players and corporate executives, and strategies for playing the WSOP Main Event.
Former poker pro and New York Times blogger Nate Silver summed up what an unusual occasion the conference was: “This is probably the first early Sunday morning conference in the history of Las Vegas.”
