Abarone68 Thrills Fans With Newest Poker Challenge

What Was the “$100k August Challenge”?

On July 31^st, 2024 Aaron Barone announced on X (ex-Twitter) the start of a new challenge with a simple yet curious terms:

• Playing $100,000 worth of poker tournaments
• Follow along on stream / (X) with daily updates
• At the end of the month, gave away 1% of his total cashes — prizes from MTTs, not profit

Aaron doesn’t tie himself to one or any other number of poker rooms. He also created an unusual system to pick a person who would take his 1% when the challenge is done.

Every stream at some point Aaron randomly picked one person on Twitch and added their nickname to “wheel of names”. At the end of the month Aaron planned to use this wheel to randomly select one winner.

How The Challenge Was Going?

Aaron started the challenge with a pomp: he spent $8,297, made cash of $5,374 and ended the session with a loss of $2,923.

The second day became a first profitable for Aaron but it didn’t help to overcome the previous loss. Since then RNG decided to take him through the roller coaster, which formally ended on August 17th.

Aaron reached his $100k goal after 14 sessions. He spent $101,205 in 797 tournaments and won $96,179 prizes with 1% of $961.79.

When formally it meant the end of the challenge, Aaron decided to continue playing and raising the giveaway prize for his viewers.

Firstly, he chose to reach $1,000 but later on the stream he expanded the challenge when decided to collect 1% of prizes strictly to the end of August. He even asked his viewers to choose a new target amount for the challenge that was a simple formality that made his fans happier.

One of the funniest moments of this challenge happened after its goal was already reached. On August 17^th Aaron had a very tough session that he named “our worst day of the challenge” because of the biggest loss to that time in a month of $5,207. Not even a day has passed when Aaron had the best session of the month:

• Buy-ins — $17,966
• Cashes — $39,496
• Profit — $21,530

It’s worth noting that a third of the cashes was for 3rd place in WSOP Online: $125 Sunday Kick-Off.

During all these days (aсtually, on almost any day) Aaron shared his daily results on X, answered all kinds of questions, discussed struggles and thoughts with fans, and gathered various support on his journey.

What Does This Challenge Teach?

From the beginning Aaron’s challenge showed that poker Twitch viewers do not really care about growth of streamer’s bankroll or numbers of giveaways.

They are more than happy to support the influencer / streamer on his journey of spending money on buy-ins, re-entry and rebuys. Even when the total amount of giveaway is unknown, fans seem to not be bothered at all — they tend to be supportive anyway.

With this challenge Aaron also showed that the “golden rule of poker” remains to be true: being focused on the volume and not on the profit and playing according to your bankroll lead to healthier reaction to short-term losses and helps to cope with it easier.

Finally, his latest but not last big August cash also teaches not only poker influencers but poker players in general that perseverance is one of the vital virtues for a successful poker career.

If you study the game, do your best, remain calm, focused and hardworking, you inevitably end with nice results. Even if 13 tries before that were full of loss and bad luck.