It’s game over for Kevin Martin and his livestreamed poker bankroll challenge after 500 hours and just $500 of poker profit.
The GGPoker ambassador took on one of the wildest bankroll challenges in poker history. Dubbed “Poker from Zero,” he set out to turn $0 into $5,000 and he livestreamed his entire life until he reached the goal or hit 500 hours. His first step was to pawn off a few items so that he could have a few hundred bucks in his online poker account. From there, the rest of the money came from micro stakes poker earnings.
Poker is a Tough Game
Shortly after calling it quits Wednesday, Martin posted a brief video on X reviewing the challenge. He was quite candid about the difficulties of playing poker for a living.
“In terms of the poker, I have to be humble about it. We just take the ‘L,’ man, we just take the ‘L,” Martin said. “I won but like we just failed at the challenge.”
In the end, he made approximately $3 per hour of playing poker. Most of the remaining hours during the Twitch livestream were spent sleeping, eating, or just taking a break from playing cards.
Martin acknowledged there are some haters out there who criticized him for taking on the challenge or for not seeing it through to his $5,000 goal, but he made no excuses.
“We just didn’t get there. We just didn’t crush. I’ll take responsibility, bro, I could have played better,” Martin owned up.
Livestreaming poker is not an easy gig, especially when the cameras are rolling 24 hours a day for three weeks. He never once took a day off from grinding at stakes well below his regular bankroll, not even during brutal sessions.
The bankroll rise was slow and inconsistent. Last weekend, he peaked at around $1,300, but then dipped down around $900 and below for the remainder of the challenge. He said he’s going to round up the bankroll to $1,000 and give it away to a random YouTube subscriber.
Every day during the challenge, Martin’s staff uploaded a recap video from the previous day to his YouTube channel. which saw a massive uptick in subscribers because of the 24/7 livestream, one of his top highlights of the past few weeks.
At the conclusion of his Wednesday X video, he left a valuable message to those who followed him on this entertaining journey.
“Poker has been a beautiful professional pursuit for me,” Martin said. “But for most people, don’t try to spin it from zero. Poker very often is this beautiful game of skill, but there’s a lot of things that can go your way. Many good players have busted, and I’d recommend playing the game on the side passionately, just always take care of your money.”
“I woke up and I grinded every single day, man. I couldn’t have tried any harder at this thing. I really didn’t think it would end this way, but off to the farm I go.”
And with that, the bankroll challenge has concluded at about 10% of the initial goal. On a positive note for “K-Mart,” thousands watched on Twitch, his YouTube channel grew, and poker fans across the world saw just how difficult it is to build a bankroll from little to nothing.