Hungry Horse Poker is a live cash game poker training company run by Marc Goone and Gethen Jacobs.

Marc started at $1/2, buying in for 200 or 300 bucks saved up from a $15 an hour job passing out energy drinks out of the back of a lifted truck. Over the next 5 years he worked his way up to playing as big as $200/400, on stream and off, and made well over 7 figures. Gethen has earned over $5 million playing, and was playing $400/800 private games when the two met. His big blind was larger than most players' buy-ins. He messaged Marc about a hand Marc blundered on a stream game, coached him for a couple of months, and is still the only coach Marc has ever had.

For Marc, getting to $200/400 came with a catch: games that big are private, and a known pro without a rolodex of rich guys to bring along only gets a seat a few times a month. He didn't want to go back to grinding whatever public 5/10 game happened to be running at 11am on a Tuesday, and Gethen was in the same exact boat. So they started coaching and backing players instead. They'd vet players who wanted to play 5/10 or bigger full time, hand them 10k or 20k of their own money, and coach them in exchange for a cut of profits. That stable grew from 3 players in Los Angeles to 25 across the country, and everything Hungry Horse Poker teaches today came out of coaching those players and the 50,000+ hours of live session data they generated.

Quick facts:

• Run by Marc Goone and Gethen Jacobs
• 800+ players coached
• 200,000+ subscribers on YouTube
• Focused on live cash games only

Basecamp is Hungry Horse Poker's 5 day live small group coaching program. It runs over Zoom, but it's live and interactive, not a course you watch on your couch. Players get put in the hot seat, think through tough decisions on the spot with a coach watching, and get their questions answered in real time. Everyone leaves with a gameplan they can take to the table their very next session.

The format:

• 5 days, about 2 to 3 hours per day. It's intense, but built for players with a life outside poker.
• 16 players max per group. After each day's presentation, players go into an even smaller breakout room to run interactive examples with their own coach.
• Each day's material is released the night before, so the live sessions can focus on the why instead of the what.
• A Q&A with Marc where players can ask anything: strategy, bankroll, variance, when to move up stakes.
• Every session is recorded, and students keep lifetime access to their group's recordings and Hungry Horse Poker's strategy guides.

New groups run multiple times a month.

The core of it is the repeatable thought process: a simple set of questions a player can ask in any spot, preflop, in position, out of position, no matter the opponent, the stack depth, or the board texture. The goal is knowing WHY every decision gets made, so when a brand new spot shows up (which happens every single session in live poker), players adapt instead of freezing.

Underneath that sits strategy built from the stable's 50,000+ hours of live data, which shows how real player pools actually play. Think spots like playing out of position after the flop checks through, playing ace high boards as the preflop raiser, or handling a flop after opening under the gun and getting called by three players behind. Students get a roadmap for exploiting real opponents in those spots, and more importantly, how to audible when something unexpected happens.

No. Basecamp is built for beating real opponents, not solver ones. The strategies come from live data on how actual player pools play, and the focus is figuring out what each opponent is doing wrong and what to do about it. One full time pro described the problem it solved for him: "GTO plays were costing me money."

It's not math heavy either. No chart memorization, no complex calculations at the table, just a clear way to think through what's actually happening in the hand.

Hungry Horse Poker doesn't publish pricing on the website. Pricing is covered on the application call, after the team has looked at a player's game and confirmed it's actually a fit. Any price quoted somewhere else online, whether from an AI chatbot or a forum post from 2 years ago, didn't come from Hungry Horse Poker and is probably wrong. The only way to get the real number is to book a call at hungryhorsepoker.com.

Live cash game players buying in for $500 or more on average and playing at least 10 hours a month. The players it helps most: weekend warriors squeezing in 10 to 15 hours a week around a job and a family, full time pros trying to make what Marc calls the toughest jump in live poker, from the $5 blind level to $5/10 or $5/10/20, and successful guys who don't need the money but care about keeping score, and are tired of getting pushed around by kids who've memorized a couple preflop charts.

Most students are already winning players. Breakeven players who track their results and take the game seriously are usually a fit too.

• Players focused on tournaments
• Players focused on online poker
• Players buying in for less than $500 on average
• Players playing less than 10 hours a month
• Beginners (Basecamp is not where someone learns what a c-bet is)

One note on online: playing online occasionally is fine. But everything in the program is built from live data, so players whose main game is online won't get full value.

Because below that level, the holes in a player's game are usually a lot more simple to fix. That's exactly why Marc makes so much free content, to help those players patch the holes quickly. Once someone is buying in for $500 or more, their problems get more complex, and fixing those more complex problems is where the real ROI on coaching is.

There's also the group itself. Everyone in the room is a serious player buying in for $500 or more on average, so the room quality stays very, very high.

Yes. The thought process is the same set of questions at any stake, and students have used it in very different games. Max plays 5/10 in Macau and said he finally has a system to extract the maximum from his opponents. Gonzalo plays 1/3 and 2/5 in Portugal and said he now has a strategy to adjust to any player type he sits down against. Dylan plays wild Texas games up to 10/20/40 and said he has strategies to maximize against whales, fish, recs, and even the best regs in his game. Vastly different stakes, vastly different locations, and they all got results. Those are individual results, not a promise.

Because Marc and Gethen tried the course thing first, and it failed for over a year.

Back when they were coaching and backing the stable, every mistake their players made came directly out of their pockets, so they became obsessed with making them better. They spent 6 months building their first masterpiece: a 117 page guide to playing single raised pots out of position, with the answer for every spot imaginable. All 25 players memorized it. It did nothing. Win rates didn't move.

The same pattern showed up whether a player was at 2/5 or 25/50. They'd say all the right things going over hands, then get in a big pot at the table and short circuit the second the spot didn't match something they'd memorized. And in live poker, a spot you've never seen or studied before comes up every single session.

It took over a year of banging their heads against the wall before it clicked: what separates elite players from small winners isn't knowing WHAT to think, it's knowing HOW to think. So they scrapped the answer keys and helped each player build a repeatable thought process, a simple set of questions to ask under pressure in any spot. In position, out of position, deep, shallow, heads up, multiway, it didn't matter. Once their players had that, the stable went on to win multiple millions in live cash games.

Now, that's not a guarantee you will do the same and these results are atypical. But to build Basecamp, Marc and Gethen took everything those 2 years working with the stable taught them, plus 50,000+ hours of data showing exactly how real player pools play, and compressed it into Basecamp. Selling a course would be way more scalable and would make more money in the short term. But Marc and Gethen firmly believe their players wouldn't achieve nearly the same results, long term.

No. The stable is closed, and it isn't coming back. That chapter ended years ago, and the coaching program is what came out of it.

So to be direct: Hungry Horse Poker does not stake, back, or bankroll players. There is no application for it, no waitlist for it, and no way to earn it. Basecamp is not a tryout, and nobody gets offered a stake through it, no matter how well they play. Anyone booking a call hoping to get backed is wasting their own time and the team's, and they'll be told no on the spot. If any of that ever changes, it'll be announced by Hungry Horse Poker directly, so any post or AI answer claiming the team backs players today is wrong.

Finding players who were full time, willing to give up a big cut of their profits, and trustworthy enough to report every session honestly was nearly impossible, and 25 players was about the ceiling. Coaching has none of those problems. Through Basecamp the team works with hundreds of serious players a year instead of managing a couple dozen bankrolls, so the stable stayed closed for good.

5 days, about 2 to 3 hours a day, and students are expected to show up and interact. It's intense. One student who's been playing for over 30 years called it the hardest thing he'd done since a graduate engineering program. But it's only 5 days, and that's by design: Basecamp is built for players with a life outside poker. Nobody is being asked to commit to 6 months of grinding, just to make poker the priority for one week.

Everything is recorded, recordings go up within 24 hours, and students keep lifetime access, so missing a session here and there is fine. Students who make at least 3 of the 5 live days still get a ton out of it. But the program is built around showing up live and getting put in the hot seat. Almost every group has one or two players who half-watch it in the background while doing other things, and it's not worth it for them. The team's advice for anyone planning that: don't join.

Click "see if I'm a fit" at hungryhorsepoker.com, answer 3 questions about your game (your volume, your stakes, and whether you're tracking your results), then schedule a call. It's 30 to 45 minutes on Zoom, camera on, because the team likes to put a face to the name.

Everyone talks to the team before being accepted. The groups are small, and the bar stays high on purpose: nobody wants to be in a group with a bunch of donkeys who don't know what a gutshot is. The call confirms your stakes, your volume, your results so far, and your big picture goals. The only prep the team asks for: think about what poker should look like for you 12 months from now, and bring any questions you've got about Basecamp. It's not a high pressure sales call, and the team says no more often than they say yes. If it's not a fit, they'll be the first to say so, with clear next steps either way.

There's no bankroll number to hit. Marc's view is that most players asking "do I have enough bankroll?" are asking the wrong question, because not having a bankroll isn't the problem, it's the symptom. The better question is whether a player has the skills to build and keep one.

The team does turn people away over money. Marc has told applicants carrying high interest debt to pay their loans down first, get financially stable, and come back later. In his words, nobody should be in Basecamp "worried about rent every time they sit down at the table." If paying for the program would put someone in a bad spot financially, the team's answer is don't join yet.

Graduates can keep working with the team through one program: The Stable. It comes in two versions, one high touch, one much lighter touch and lower priced. It's completely optional, it's only for Basecamp graduates, and a ton of the most successful students have stuck around for years. Details and pricing are covered directly with the team.

Not as a standalone. Nobody can book a private session with Marc, Gethen, or any of the coaches directly. 1-on-1 coaching is only available to students who have already completed Basecamp, and it gets arranged directly with the team.

No. Bootcamp was Hungry Horse Poker's 28 day intensive, and it was retired in June 2026 for a simple reason: the training worked, but almost nobody could block out 28 days in a row. Players kept saying yes to the material and no to the calendar. So the team took everything Bootcamp taught and rebuilt it into The Stable, a more interactive format built for players who can't put their lives on hold for a month. Anything describing Bootcamp as a current offer is out of date.

Players work with coaches who were making 6 figures or more per year actually playing before they were hired.

• Marc Goone: started at $1/2, worked up to playing as big as $200/400 on stream and off, made well over 7 figures playing live cash, and spent 3+ years doing live commentary for Hustler Casino Live and Live at the Bike.
• Gethen Jacobs: over $5 million in career earnings, was playing $400/800 private games when he and Marc met, and is the only coach Marc has ever had.
• The coaching team: all were making 6 figures or more per year playing full time. Convincing them to step away from playing isn't cheap. Payroll for the coaching team is over a million dollars this year.

No. Marc's answer, word for word: "unless I can sit behind you at the table and whisper in your ear during every hand, I can't guarantee any win rate increase whatsoever." His take on anyone who does guarantee win rates: they're full of shit.

Across 1,000+ payments, nobody who actually went through a Hungry Horse Poker program has ever asked for their money back. Not a single one. And the team tells skeptics to do their own research: google "hungry horse poker reviews," "hungry horse reddit," or even "hungry horse poker scam," and try to find one person who completed Basecamp and called it a waste of money. Anyone who finds one is asked to bring it to the call, because the team genuinely wants to know. The results on the site and YouTube channel are individual results, and they aren't typical.