Poker pros and the sites they play for

One of the most interesting things in recent online poker history is the hiring of professional players by various poker rooms to push their brand in a various live and online poker events. Some of these players do indeed stay within the limits determined by their human condition. There are others out there though who seem to ignore the fact that at the end of the day they are just one person and not a small country when it comes to finances. Who sponsors these players? Do they indeed play out of their own pockets, and if so how come that going several years without a profit, while dropping around $1 million each month doesn’t bankrupt them?
If you are as avid a poker fan as I am, you probably know about the extraordinary losing run that Gus Hansen had had for a couple years, before he managed to right things and get back on the winning track this year.
I know the man was stacked when his losing streak began, but he lost so much money it would have bankrupted a small country and he still kept going.

There are other players out there, like Patrick Antonius, Tom Dwan and a handful of others, who seem to never run out of money either.
You probably know about Swedish mystery man Isildur1 too. He was definitely not affiliated with any online poker operation, and sure enough, when a truly bad losing streak hit him, he busted his Full Tilt Poker account and disappeared from the high-stakes online scene.
There are people out there, who lose much more than he ever did, and they still never seem to bust. They’re back the next day playing at the same nosebleed stakes, and possibly losing more. Who sponsors these people? Could it be that the action they generate, and the attention they garner is so valuable to the poker room that it allows them to play with real currency out of the poker room’s pockets. While such a scenario is not that likely to be frank, it could be a possibility.

There are other pros out there like Phil Ivey of Full Tilt Poker, like Phil Hellmuth and like Annie Duke of UB, who never seem to outspend the limits of human reason, even though they’re probably as stacked as some of the guys mentioned above.
With Isildur1 now back in action at PokerStars, this time as an in-house professional, it’ll be extremely interesting to see whether or not he will be able to bust his account yet again…