Long-time poker streamer and winner of Big Brother Canada 5, Kevin Martin, embarked on one of his toughest challenges yet. Martin created this self-imposed “War Room Challenge”, where he promised to shave his head if he finished his weekend poker session without making a profit.
Non-stop streaming
Martin put up cameras all over his apartment and planned to stream for over 60 hours on his YouTube channel. In addition, he announced he was shot-taking the whole weekend, playing much higher stakes than he usually does. However, he had issues from the get-go as he was banned from YouTube for 24 hours for using prop guns in his advertising campaign. He kicked off the 60-hour challenge on Twitch before finishing the final 48 hours on YouTube.
Starting off slow
In the first 11 hours of his stream, Martin had a ton of close calls but found himself down close to $5,000. Martin then told his fans that he’d likely put up around $20,000 in buy-ins on Sunday.
However, there was plenty of time to make the money back, and he started buying in big. He started firing four-figure tournaments, and late on Sunday, he finished third in a 62-entry $1,050 High Rollers Sunday Closer event for $9,949.98 score, his biggest cash of the challenge.
Still, when he went into Monday, Martin found himself down about $2,500, so his hair was certainly in jeopardy.
Saved by the bell
While Monday was set up to be extremely sweaty, Kevin Martin’s stream team was prepared to reveal a technicality that completely changed the challenge. Martin had earned a total of $3,065 in rakeback, which, at the time, put him barely into the profit zone. This, of course, was pretty controversial, as rakeback generally isn’t taken into account in similar challenges. However, given that it was a challenge that he put on himself, he and his stream team were judge, jury, and executioner.
Martin would continue on with his challenge for a much smaller Monday stream and, by the end of it all, Martin won his self-imposed challenge. Martin realized that he was locked into an extremely tiny profit and decided not to play anymore late on Monday. Martin ended up winning his very last tournament, a 28-player $54 Bounty Hunters tournament, for $613.52, pushing his total profits from $74 to $687.
In the end, the final numbers were decent: $30,002 in cashes from $29,315 in buy-ins. He ended up cashing in three of his biggest buy-ins, which undoubtedly helped him win the challenge.
Other huge poker streaming feats
Kevin Martin is far from the only player to stream marathon poker sessions. Another Big Brother Canada contestant, PokerStars streamer Arlie Shaban, set a poker streaming record of 1,000 hours in just 125 days in 2017 and 2018. That’s eight hours a day for over four months. What made that feat even more impressive is that he had never streamed before, and he won roughly $10,000 and earned 7,000 Twitch subscribers during the four-month marathon.
However, that record didn’t go on for very long. English streamer Lukas Robinson, also known in the industry as “RobinPoker”, met Shaban and was motivated to break his record. Robinson ended up chasing the poker dream with an $8,000 bankroll, quit his job, and streamed for 10 hours a day for 100 days straight. After an extremely swingy three months, he hit it big via a $22,000 score. He ended up being signed by GGPoker shortly thereafter.
Finally, GGPoker streamer Hristivoje Pavlovic, also known as “ALLinPav”, won five tournaments in a single stream back in October 2024. He earned $28,694.70 in profit in just one day.
