A New Era for MotherShip Poker

All good things must come to an end. Change is the only constant. Humans have lots of cliches and sayings about how life is in constant flux but cliches are there for a reason — they represent a hard truth about the world and reflect the ubiquity of that truth.

And change is the only constant in life. We are constantly in flux, and the same is true for all our endeavours. As a result, after about 6 years of streaming online poker from the Unibet Poker app, I was forced to bring my association with the brand to a close at the end of 2024 when regulatory changes blacked the client out for Canadian players.

My stream on Unibet was Dec 14th when I was proud to host the Stratosphere, a long-running Saturday home game. Two days later, my access to the poker was terminated and my time with Unibet was complete.

I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to all the people at Unibet and Kindred who helped and supported me over the years as I ran my bankroll challenge to build a bankroll from zero. It’s been a ride I couldn’t even have dreamed of when I started the stream and in addition to 6 years of great poker, the community at MotherShip Poker has developed into close friends.

Over 6 years of play on the site, I played €20k worth of micro- and low-stakes poker with just shy of €22k in winnings over that time. I was active on more than 1,400 days with more than 8,600 tournaments on Unibet Poker both on and off the stream.

A Crazy Ride

After six years, while I didn’t accomplish all the goals I had with the stream, I can’t see it as anything but a success. I never intended it as a profit center as much as a way to have some fun playing low-stakes poker with a community of friends.

I did have aspirations, however, and while some of those were met, others were more elusive. One of my goals was to build a bankroll from zero with profitable play and I was clearly a profitable player on Unibet overall with €2k extra in wins over my total buy-ins.

One of my other goals, however, was to run my BR up to a size to be playing the biggest games on the client. I never quite managed to get there — every time I tried to move up beyond the €1-€5 buy-in range, my BR took a stomping and eventually I accepted that, without more training effort on my part, I’d always stay a low-stakes player.

But it was still a ride that I couldn’t have imagined when I kicked off the first stream in Jan 2019 with just a few Euros in my account and big dreams. Unibet stepped up to sponsor me at the start of 2020, in no small part to Ian Simpson, who was a Unibet ambassador at the time but has since moved on to represent 888poker.

Over the next few years, Unibet and their representatives really made an effort to support the stream. Simpson, along with his colleagues David Lappin and Dara O’Kearney beamed onto the MotherShip for a rare low-stakes coaching session, and Lappin and O’Kearney, who also host The Chip Race podcast, threw an invite my way to come on the show to discuss diversity and inclusion in poker.

It’s no secret to viewers of the stream that I went through some mental game problems and, especially in the final few years, took a pretty significant hit on what was once a more impressive bankroll.

At its height, my maximum profit on the site was close to €4,400, but by the time the Unibet era drew to a close in late 2024, that profit had dwindled to just shy of €2k. In the end, though, it doesn’t really matter how much profit I made there — in raw terms, my ROI ended up at around 10% over the 6 years based on money spent versus money won but the truth is, my ROI there was infinite.

I started my journey there with €0 in my account and didn’t make a deposit through the entire time I played on the site. That means every penny of the money I won, which in the end amounted to about $2,600 Canadian after the exchange rate, was won with ZERO investment on my part, beyond the time I spent playing the games.

Was it an overall “profitable” venture for me? In dollar terms, almost certainly not. I came out ~$2.6k ahead, but I spent a lot of hours of my time doing that on the micro- and low-stakes tables. So while from one perspective, the stream gave me infinite ROI, from another, it was a net loss as my “hourly pay” while streaming was absurdly low.

Life is about far more than just money, however, which might sound odd coming from a dedicated poker player. But the real profit I got from six years on the MotherShip streaming Unibet poker wasn’t measured in Euros or %ROI — it was measured in the journey I got to take with Unibet and some very close friends in my stream community.

Anyone who knows me will be unsurprised to find the end of this twisted down to a Star Trek quote, but it’s not my problem there’s a quote for every occasion.

In the end, for me, the journey was far more valuable than the raw dollars I might have made. Over 6 years, I grew from €0 and 0 viewers, through a site sponsorship complete with my own custom avatar and branded games, to a profitable end with a close-knit group of friends, many of whom were there from the first stream to the last. I can’t see that as anything but a raging success.

I just want to end this with a final thanks to Unibet Poker for the support. Even after the direct sponsorship ended, the site continued to spend ~€500 a month on community support initiatives for my stream and, at least for now, the Stratosphere and its feeder games (the Centroll and Launchpad, both of which featured tickets to the Stratosphere as added prizes in micro-stakes games) live on. In the end, it was a ride I never thought I’d have a chance to go on, and the support from Unibet was a huge part of that.

Thank you, Unibet — it’s been a blast. On to new skies for MotherShip Poker.