Poker YouTube Channels Can Add Value To Society: Mariano Grandoli

Who Is Mariano Grandoli?

Mariano is a very successful young star of the live poker scene, who started regularly playing poker in 2019.

Since then, he also posts vlogs on YouTube channel “Mariano” where, as of November 14th, 2024 were more than 167K subscribers and 33.2M views.

The most popular video on his channel is Action at Caesars Palace but it isn’t what makes him trending. Mariano’s brand started to rise after he became a regular participant of Hustler Casino Live, Live At The Bike and Poker At The Lodge games in 2021.

He maintains an image of someone charming and chatty yet not afraid to make bold moves and play really big spots.

You can find detailed reports with Mariano’s results on HighRollerPoker — we added a screenshot with an example of up-to-date information on November 14th, 2024:

One of the most hyped moments of Mariano’s career is participation in AA vs KK vs KK spot with almost $800,000 pot, which he himself considers “the most boring hand of all time probably”.

How Mariano Became A Poker Star?

Before poker, “King Argentina” was a delivery guy in Pizza Hut. He found out about poker in college thanks to the professor of statistics who often reference Game Theory to explain some concepts:

“I started looking into what exactly that meant and that’s when I learned about Nash Equilibrium and all this other nerdy stuff which I was always drawn to. I really like chess, I like math, I like Sudoku — I like all these sort of puzzle style games. And then poker was the one that it turns out you’re able to win a lot of money at if you’re good at it so I was just naturally drawn to that.

I’ve always been someone who likes to try to earn money and compete in psychological warfare nerdy math stuff. So, it just checked all these boxes for me personally.”

When Mariano was fired from his job, poker seemed like a good way to make some money. So, he started playing $1/3 and eventually lost all his money after maybe two visits to the casino. But his desire to play didn’t waver at all, and he find success with a little luck:

“I ended up having to borrow money from a childhood friend, one of my best friends. He loaned me I want to say $1,000 or $500 and luckily that bullet worked out. I want to say “that bankroll” but it’s not even a bankroll. Over the next month or two, or maybe probably longer, I was able to run it up to $10,000 and then I hit a bad beat jackpot for $7,000. So, I was pretty much rich after that.”

As he played and gradually climbed up the stakes, Mariano — who watched Andrew Neeme vlogs on YouTube and was inspired by them a lot — felt the desire to become a vlogger too:

“I always kind of had this creative side to me where I like to produce music or videos or stuff like that. So it seemed like a good outlet and a good crossover in this new hobby.

I didn’t never had any expectations of it. I thought at the time that the poker vlog space was already overly saturated because there were like three people doing it. There was Neeme and, I think, Brad Owen. There was TheTrooper97Vlog and maybe a few other small channels. And I was like: “Oh, you know, it’s too late”. But it’s funny to think that now because there’s probably I don’t even know how many ,maybe a thousand now, but luckily I got into it right around the start of it and the videos ended up catching more traction than I expected.”

His popularity and natural charm became noticeable enough to probably push live poker streams’ teams to reach out to him and invite Mariano as a guest. The first and most influential invite for his career was from Hustler Casino Live:

“I can’t quite remember how many subscribers I had at the time of my first Hustler appearance. I don’t think my channel was very big. However, it was enough to get my foot in the door with Ryan Feldman.

He’s got a tough job. When he started the stream he probably had thousands of so-called pros or try-hards or just good players hit him up trying to play. How do you decide who to allow to play? And I think having that YouTube channel helped me get my foot in there but I don’t think I was “YouTube famous” or anything like that. I still don’t really know if I am.

Anyway, I didn’t have a big channel at the time and it’s definitely grown since the Hustler stuff has happened but I like to think I helped them grow a bit too. We kind of exchanged audiences — it was mutually beneficial and I think it still continues to be.”

How To Create A Successful Poker Channel On YouTube

When Dan asked Mariano to give advice to players aspiring to become poker youtubers, “King Argentina” shared a few tips and thoughts based on his experiences:

“One of the things that worked for me is to not really have expectations of much but just do it for the love of the game or the love of the content creation.

Having your own fuel to continue doing something just because you like doing it is going to work more than doing something for the sake of trying to reach a milestone or accomplish X number of subscribers or X number of dollars or anything like that. That’s what helped me and that’s what still helps me to keep going — I just enjoy this whether a video gets 10 views or 500,000 — I just like what I’m doing. 

The same could be said about the music stuff we’re doing where whether no one listens or like the whole world listens we’re just doing it for fun. It’s a passion project and that’s what’s helped me be successful in the poker space. 

So, I would just say: try to apply that and if you don’t have any love for the game or any passion for it — then it’s probably not for you.”

Interestingly, Mariano himself gives an honor of making his channel continue to grow and prosper not solely to his efforts and passion but to the game itself: 

“I think the foundation for building the channel is that people just love poker surprisingly.

So even after all this time people just love hands. They love 3bet pots. They love 4bet pots. They love tricky situations, They love coolers. They love it all!

I think that that’s been the backbone of the channel despite how many drone footage videos you want to include or b-roll or something cool. At the end of the day it’s just the poker and people enjoy that.

So I think that’s really what helped my channel grow is it was always mostly about the hands and I would just share my thoughts and people seem to either connect with those thoughts or maybe learn from them or tell me I’m awful or whatever it was.

But being able to provide people with examples of hands and situations that could arise in their own games I think always brought value to the audience.“

Why Poker Channels Can Be Beneficial For The Society

While Dan Cates preaches to find new ways to use poker as an instrument to fight poverty — specifically because of skill set that this game helps people to built — Mariano sees himself as a part of not so grandiose but also very useful plan to help society:

“I think one of the ways of adding value to society through poker is the YouTube channel. 

It’s helped a lot of guys learn basics, or maybe just entertainment, or it could be therapeutic to watch YouTube vlogs.

I know that firsthand since I watch a lot of chess videos and it helps with whatever anxiety or stress I might be dealing with. So yeah — there are ways to add value to society through poker — I think it’s just you got to find them.”