Several companies exist in the still-developing poker insurance market. Some insure tournaments, while others like InsuredPlay focus on real money ring games. Here’s a quick summary of how InsuredPlay works. Let’s say you’re all-in on the flop with an 80% chance to win a $100 pot. InsuredPlay will automatically insure the hand for $20 plus a small premium, which it will deduct from your InsuredPlay account. If you lose the hand, InsuredPlay will send you $100.

A recent thread in the poker forumshere on PocketFives focused on a few of the benefits and drawbacks to using insurance services. PocketFives sat down with InsuredPlay’s Emre Kenci to learn about how the company can help online poker players. By the way, InsuredPlay recently came out of beta testing.

PocketFives: What gave you the idea to launch InsuredPlay?

Emre Kenci: Bad beats and downswings. I played poker a lot in 2009 on Full Tilt and was running pretty bad. I constantly had to move down in stakes, so I started looking for ways to reduce variance and there were none available at that time. I knew the concept of insurance, started working on how it can be applied to online poker, and InsuredPlay was born.

PocketFives: Tell us about yourself and your poker background. How could InsuredPlay have helped you while you were playing?

Emre Kenci: I had played about 250,000 hands during that time on Full Tilt and would have saved about five buy-ins if I were using insurance as it is offered on InsuredPlay. I don’t think people would believe the numbers if we published them, but we will be releasing the graphs and stats of people who play with InsuredPlay in the future.

PocketFives: Some players feel it is not worth paying any additional premium on top of what the poker site itself is charging. What players do you think will benefit the most from purchasing cash game insurance? How do you rationalize to people that they should take advantage of this type of service?

Emre Kenci: I don’t think it’s rational to compare our fee to a poker site’s rake. When you buy insurance, you get a service in return, and buying that service might be a profitable choice. Insurance will certainly help players who want to play higher stakes. It reduces your bankroll requirement and allows you to play in games where you are skilled enough to play but are under-bankrolled.

It will also help high-volume players by reducing variance and preventing downswings. For high-volume players, the fee is 1%, which I think is worth the reduction in variance.
You do not have to play that much, by the way, as a 1% fee is very achievable; it only requires 200 insured hands in the last 30 days. There is also the psychological side to the game. Poker is not an isolated, purely mathematical game. Bad beats, variance, and downswings are not easy to handle.

PocketFives: How might purchasing insurance help your poker decisions?

Emre Kenci: The mental state you are in is very important in poker. I was reading Tommy Angelo’s “Elements of Poker” the other day and it’s almost entirely about having the right mindset at a poker table. Bad beats cause tilt, and tilt causes bad decisions that make you lose money. Knowing your bad beats are covered will take away some of that pain. In the end, even though it might look like you paid extra, you will have saved some money. We’re not claiming that insurance will make you play nosebleeds, reduce your variance to zero, and make you 100% tilt-proof, but it will absolutely help.

PocketFives: What are some of the free benefits to people visiting InsuredPlay’s website?

Emre Kenci: The hand history section on the website is free to use. It shows your poker hands grouped into cash game sessions and tournaments. You can easily view information like how much you won or lost, how long you played, how many hands you saw, etc. You can replay or share your hands without having to deal with hand history files. We also track your tournament hands. You will find all of your tournament hands and results in the hand history section.

PocketFives: What are your long-term plans for InsuredPlay? We’ve seen other sites offer services like bubble protection, for example.

Emre Kenci: We have a lot of plans and a lot of different projects in mind. But, first we need to do what we are doing perfectly and explain ourselves to the community before we move on to other projects. Bubble insurance for tournaments is something we are looking into. To me, using bubble insurance is about taking a shot at a tournament that is above your bankroll. So, if we do it, it will be designed for that kind of mentality.

PocketFives: Talk about the process of using InsuredPlay during a hand. What does a user have to do to activate InsuredPlay while they’re playing?

Emre Kenci: The user does not have to do anything while they are playing. No decisions are made in real-time. The situations you want insurance for are determined prior to game play. For example, let’s say you set your minimum odds for insurance to 80%. When you go all-in or call an all-in bet with an 80% or more chance to win, the hand will automatically get insured. You can also customize your settings to only insure pots that are larger than a minimum size you determine.

PocketFives: Respond to this PocketFives member question about InsuredPlay: “This seems like a cool idea, but aren’t you essentially betting against yourself because you have to keep money in the insured account?”

Emre Kenci: Technically, yes. You are making a side bet for losing a hand. You are hedging the bet you make at a poker table by placing a bet with us.

PocketFives: Talk about how a person can figure out what insurance percentage is optimal for them.

Emre Kenci: I think ultimately every player has to find the optimal settings for his style by playing around. I like to insure all hands where I’m the favorite, including coin flips, for pots larger than 50 big blinds. But, I can’t say if that’s the optimal setting for everyone.

Visit InsuredPlayfor more details.