Well-known poker players always like to talk about winnings, big titles and successes. The costs of these winnings and titles, however, remain mostly unknown to the spectators. To give a blatant example: David Williams finished 117th in the Flip&Go tournament at the WSOP this year and collected 2,155 dollars. That’s all well and good, but he had to buy in 19 times and thus paid 19,000 dollars in buy-ins. What looks like a small win on paper is in reality a huge loss.

With Brandon Shack-Harris, a WSOP professional has now disclosed all his tournament data, including all buy-ins.

Brandon Shack-Harris has been a key player at the WSOP for a decade and is one of the most active and successful players on the tour. Since 2010 he has accumulated 2 WSOP titles, 3 second place finishes, 3 third place finishes and 6 other final tables. In 2014, he finished second to George Danzer in the Player of the Year race and won a total of almost $3.5 million in prize money.

On his homepage, Shack-Harris revealed how much money he invested in WSOP tournaments during the twelve years and how much net profit he made.

The most important figures first: Brandon Shack-Harris invested over 1.2 million dollars in buy-ins. This compares to winnings of almost 3.5 million dollars. Spread over all tournaments, his ROI (return on investment) is at around 184%.

This is how Shack-Harris’ WSOP profits and buy-ins have developed since 2010:

Profits and losses in numbers

These are the profits and losses of Brandon Shack-Harris in numbers since 2010:

All in all, Bandon Shack-Harris turned a profit in 5 of his 12 years at the WSOP, in 7 years he had to record net losses. He participated in a total of 230 tournaments and cashed in 53 of those, meaning he’s in the money in roughly 23% of all tournaments.

Brandon Shack-Harris is certainly in the top percentile of all players at the WSOP in terms of quality of play. His data shows that even a player of such calibre has to put up with significant variance. Good years also contrast with several years of near six-figure losses.

In order to be successful over the long run in tournaments with large fields, you need a little luck and, above all, the will to invest a lot – in the case of Shack-Harris, over 1.2 million dollars.

Shack-Harris’ results at the WSOP since 2010