Should The Hendon Mob Rankings Include Stakes Alongside Winnings?

Images courtesy of PokerGO Tour

The Hendon Mob has provided poker players, fans, and industry insiders with information about poker for decades. It is widely recognized as the best resource for tracking poker results since its inception in the mid-1990s, and in recent years has grown and grown.

With virtually all the ranking tournament earnings for every player now available on The Hendon Mob, the database of poker winnings is more complete than ever before.

In this new age of GTO poker, however, is The Hendon Mob missing crucial information – that being the amount that players lose as well as win? We’re talking entry fees, buy-ins, re-entries, and rebuys.

As Stephen Chidwick revealed in a recent Reddit ‘Ask Me Anything’, of the $76 million he’s won in poker tournaments over his poker career, his actual take-home winnings on that amount were somewhere between $5m and $10m.

Should The Hendon Mob now include, or rather remove, buy-ins from poker tournaments from players’ scores to reflect their true earnings, or are the inflated amounts that currently adorn the All-Time Money List perfectly adequate?

Let’s take a look.

Gathering Evidence

Before an argument can be made one way or the other, let’s look at some of the reasons why declaring losses within the internet pages of The Hendon Mob (THM) would be useful and how anyone might go about doing that.

Poker results are generally submitted to THM after a ranking poker tournament has been completed in the casino, cardroom, or other live venue. The organizers pass on the information, and the entries, winners, and other summary information are then input into the THM database.

Gathering how many buy-ins each player had into the event would not be difficult. Most modern casino entry systems record information in the eventuality that it might be challenged, or another query might arise before, during, or after the tournament. While this would be extra work for casino staff before they submit the details to THM, it wouldn’t be impossible.

Tracking down previous buy-ins might be a lot tougher, however. Knowing who entered the $10,000 freezeout 1976 WSOP Main Event could be difficult.

On the one hand, it’s a prestigious event, and Doyle Brunson took the only prize in the winner-take-all 22-man event.

On the flip side, the field might be hard to research with only four players currently listed as having reached the latter stages via THM. Very few events in recent years would hold onto information regarding rebuys and re-entries for any substantial amount of time.  

If records changed, it is possible that they would change from this moment in poker history onwards, rather than including the last half-century of results.

The Argument for Including Buy-ins

We’ve looked at the ease or otherwise of gathering information, and while there might be issues with re-entries and rebuys, knowing the stakes of each tournament already and adjusting results accordingly would be a major step forward.

From a set of results worth $20 million, for instance, it could easily be that any assumed poker ‘multi-millionaire’ might actually have earned $2m-$3m over that time as genuine profit.

Now let’s extrapolate those earnings across a career of a dozen years, a time period during which winning such an amount would be impressive to say the least. Even at the upper end, $3m dived by 12 years is an annual set of earnings of $250,000.

Deducting travel and living expenses for this decade would also bring this poker professional’s earnings at the felt down to a level where the average Joe would comprehend how they are not living in a fantasy world.

When traveling around the world as an elite poker pro, the living expenses are vast, and even if someone is so successful that they buy a big house and run expensive habits, the upkeep of that lifestyle is such that it can be challenging, to say the least.

Then there’s trying not to fall into what I’ll call ‘soccer syndrome’. In elite soccer, European megastars can be paid millions while they play, but there are hundreds of tales that forewarn Premier League stars from overspending because the career is short, and the money needed to sustain that lifestyle dries up.

The same principle is true in poker, and as fans, knowing that a poker player who has won $20 million at the felt paid $15m in buy-ins to get there might make the game far more realistic in terms of aspiration and adoration.

Poker players who work hard enough at the game to become professionals should already be lauded for doing exactly that. The current THM standings don’t reflect the truth about exactly how much they have won and could be changed to simply include buy-ins in the results, i.e., if a player enters the World Series of Poker Main Event for $10,000 and cashes for $20,000 in 1,350th place, then their current recorded ‘winnings’ are $20,000 on THM.

In reality, they laid out $10,000 and took back $20,000. They are only $10,000 up, and THM is reflecting double that amount as it currently stands.

The Argument for Excluding Buy-Ins

As it stands, the Hendon Mob doesn’t include buy-ins and therefore reflects only winnings for any of the ranking players. This might be misleading, but are there positives that go alongside this? Absolutely.

For a start, there is the aspirational aspect. Poker players start playing the game because they dream of many things. Fame, recognition from your peers, and an exciting lifestyle might all fit into that initial vision, but money is top of the list.

When a new poker player discovers the game and then plays it long enough, hopefully improving along the way, it is inevitable that they’ll stumble across THM at some point.

When they do, the amounts they see players who were once on the same track as them winning may have an influence on whether they continue along that path.

This aspirational element to poker is why many tournament players chase titles or cash game regulars dream of that inflated pot where their aces beat the table whale’s kings.

The first time I won a ranking tournament on THM, I had worked in poker for two years. It was a very exciting moment for me, and I looked up my rankings, not in the All-Time Money List, but in my country. I recognized some of the names above me, and it naturally made me want to cash again, to chase them down.

If those players’ buy-ins had been removed from their ranking, they might not even have been on the list. For all I knew, they were losing players, and the level of inspiration would have been nonexistent. That is part of the magic that THM in its current form provides.

A further problem with reflecting anything other than the money won in any event is that various factors muddy the waters of buy-ins.

Did the player sell any action, either via established staking sites like PokerStake or Stake Kings, or to their peers in the cardroom before action got underway? Do they owe money on a staking deal? Were they bought in by their sponsored site, or did they put their own money into the pot? There are simply too many factors to be able to discern the true buy-in of each player.

With THM unable to be accurately updated historically, the argument to leave the rankings as they are preserves the qualities the current site reflects. Poker players can see exactly how much players have won over poker’s glorious history and make their own mind up over what they have lost.

In Conclusion

The concept of updating The Hendon Mob to accurately reflect the true winnings of poker players would undoubtedly have several benefits, as revealing the truth always does.

But there are myriad reasons why doing so would complicate the authority of the site, such as historic results and buy-in discrepancies. While the idea of a site-wide update is appealing to many, as it stands, The Hendon Mob provides the picture we most need to see about poker’s history.

Does THM put an added layer of gloss on poker players? Of course. But once you’re in the game to any depth, you understand the water we are all swimming in, and the context of the results displayed on the site.

To the outside world, those numbers inspire the next generation of poker players to put down their money and dream of winning titles.

Those new players aspire to be listed forever on poker’s favorite resource for information on the game we all love.