YaAaRnY prop bet - Negative one buy-in, but impressive results and a big WCOOP score

Bren "YaAaRnY" Lenton has started a prop bet last month, where he bet that he can win 100 buy-ins and play at least 70,000 hands at the $5/$10 or higher Pot Limit Omaha tables in 31 days. In the end, he didn't manage to win the bet, but even people who bet against him agreed that his performance was impressive, and he also managed to score a runner-up finish in one of the WCOOP events for $55,000.

The exact rules for the YaAaRnY prop bet were:

  • Minimum profit: 10.000 big blinds without rakeback
  • Stake: $5/$10 or higher
  • Timeframe: 31 days
  • Start: 2014, August 23, 5:00 CET
  • Eligible tables: Regular, Zoom, Deep Ante
  • Non-eligible tables: Heads Up
  • Minimum hands played: 70,000
  • Odds: 2:1 in favor of YaAaRnY

The bet started on August 23 and YaAaRnY started of well, he won 3,000 big blinds in the first 35,000 hands, but then he went on a huge downswing, at hand #45,000 he was already down more than 3,000 big blinds.

On September 9 (16 days before the end of the bet) he posted the following graph: roughly 90,000 hands and around 5,800 big blinds.

YaAaRnY managed to climb to 80 buy-ins profit, and two days before the end of the challenge he was up 76 buy-ins, and this is when things went downhill. He tried to win the last 24 buy-ins by playing a marathon session, but he just kept losing pots, and was forced to gamble it up and play high variance lines, which didn't work out well.

In the final day before the end of the bet, he had to win 40 buy-ins but had a disasterous session and eventually finished the prop bet with the result of -1 buy-in. He stated that he is not too disappointed, since he got second in the $215 PLO (1R1A) WCOOP tournament for $55,000 and he also won a lot on the $25/$50 tables, and lost most of the buy-ins on the smaller stakes.

Even though he lost the bet, the poker community agrees that playing this much and coming pretty close (he was up 76 buy-ins at one point, and if he had a bit more time to grind he probably would've been able to play fewer tables and play with less variance, which would've been a big factor) is a very impressive performance.

If you want to check out the final live stream of the YaAaRnY prop bet, hosted by prop bet legend Joe Ingram, you can check it out below: