Jaime Staples has been a major part of the Twitch poker community and Team RIU for quite some time. Thanks to the success of his own stream, his brother Matt got into the game. He started streaming his own sessions and is now the latest member of the RIU family.
The younger of the two Staples wasn’t even interested in the game until Jaime began his stream. Since Jaime was spending so much time growing his stream and grinding it out on the virtual felt, he needed someone to help him away from the table.
He offered Matt, who was just starting out at University, a job as a personal assistant. Matt accepted the offer and before long, Matt was streaming himself and building his own Twitch community.
Jaime decided he was going to move to Calgary with fellow Team RIU member Kevin Martin. He wanted to grind in Calgary and look to travel around Europe while grinding it out on the felt. Matt decided to go with him, take a hiatus from school and work as his personal assistant. The idea of helping out his brother while having the opportunity to travel the world was too good of an opportunity to pass up.
That’s when he began to take poker more seriously. He would work for Jaime during the day and play poker tournaments online at night.
He started out playing micro-stakes tournaments, playing for literal pennies. He streamed all of it.
Unlike any other poker player streaming, Matt learned the game with people watching his every move on a stream. He streamed his micro-stakes tournaments and allowed his fans to watch him grow from the micros to small-stakes and into the mid-stakes regular he’s become.
Now, after three and a half years of playing poker and streaming on Twitch, he’s begun to take shots at the high-stakes events, throwing in a couple $215 and $109 buy-ins alongside his regular games. He isn’t a regular at those stakes yet, however, he does plan on getting there one day.
For him, it’s all about cracking the code and figuring out optimal strategy that will allow him to beat the players at the next level. He went through the same process before. He hit a plateau moving from small-stakes to mid-stakes before breaking through. Now, he’s making that same transition with more on the line.
That’s what his stream is all about. It’s about his journey up the ranks, the daily grind, moving up in stakes and making final tables.
Having Jaime as an older brother helped Matt achieve his goals. He was able to get a solid foundation of poker strategy from somebody who was already achieving success on the felt, while also getting to see what it takes to put together a successful stream.
Jaime isn’t responsible for the current strategies that Matt is implementing, but after last March’s prop bet victory against Bill Perkins, they will be forever linked in some ways after completing one of the most highly publicized weight loss/gain bets in recent poker history.
The two brothers wagered $3,000 to win $150,000 from Perkins if they could close a 171-pound weight gap in one year. Matt weighed in at 134 pounds while Jaime weighed in at 305.
A year later, at Run It Up Reno last March, they weighed in at the Peppermill Hotel and Casino at the exact same weight, rendering them $150,000 richer. The bet was a blessing to Matt’s stream and increased his popularity and visibility in the poker world.
During the bulking process, Matt wasn’t streaming as much. The effort it took to add that sort of mass drained his energy and forced him away from the online grind for more than he wanted to.
Now that it’s over, it’s back to business. Back to moving up the ladder and beating the games.
While he’s not sure of the exact timeline it will happen, Matt is confident that he’ll be beating high-stakes tournaments and is excited to do it as a part of Team RIU.
