

If you want to make Kevin Martin roll his eyes, just call him a Reality TV star.

“I don’t identify with that word at all. Especially, there’s something with the American shows, they get a little bit of fame, but a Canadian reality TV star is even more of an asterisk,” said Martin, who was a contestant on Big Brother Canada in 2015. “It feels like a long time ago, yeah. Time goes fast though. As soon as you invest in your projects, time goes very fast.”



Evicted after seven weeks, Martin, now a member of Team PokerStars Online, turned his energy back to poker as soon as he was back home. Before being cast on Big Brother he had met Jaime Staples at a small cash game in Lethbridge, Alberta and the two hit it off right away – even if it only happened because Staples was owning Martin in nearly every pot.

“I bought in for $200 and there was this kid whose name was Jaime, and he just beat me in every pot. He called me when I had a bluff and he folded when I had the nuts,” recalled Martin. “He just read me like a book every time, I was like, ‘How are you doing this?’ He was like, ‘Well …’ and he coached me. He helped me out in my poker progression pretty quickly.”

That was three and half years ago now and Martin calls Staples his best friend. When Staples jumped on Twitch and started streaming, Martin took notice and saw it as an opportunity to follow suit and, just like poker, learn from Staples.

“To have someone where I can not only talk hands with, and talk details with, but to say, ‘Hey Jaime, I’m going to do this on my stream, what do you think about this?’ It’s very, very valuable,” said Martin, who now lives with Staples in Montreal along with Matthew Staples and a new addition to the house.

“Jeff Gross just moved in too, so there’s four of us full time streamers. The saying is you don’t want to be the smartest person in the room and I’ve definitely had that early in my content creation and poker career,” said Martin while in Atlantic City for the PokerStars Live Festival New Jersey. “I’ve just had some really good relationships with some very successful people that have given me advice, helped me out and really, really sped up my progress.”

Before Martin was a poker pro or a reality TV star, worked as a radio host and has an education in broadcasting, so he took to streaming pretty quickly and built up his audience. PokerStars took notice and despite his relative inexperience, began talking to him about coming on board as a sponsored pro.

“PokerStars approached me last spring and they said, ‘Hey Kevin, we like your channel, we like how you represent Poker’, I was blown away by the phone call because in the history of Poker Stars, they’ve sponsored players in the top one percent, in the top point five percent, they’ve sponsored players who have made a six figure living from Poker,” said Martin. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m a good poker player, I definitely represent the game well, I work my ass of to study and get better, but I’m not a world class Poker player.”

Martin’s sharp enough to know he’s not Jason Mercier or Vanessa Selbst or Daniel Negreanu but has developed a following and has a responsibility of sorts to be the player that can serve as a model of success for players not regularly playing $10K buy-in events around the world.

“I would love to represent that person that plays medium and small stakes and is working on their game. That would be a huge blessing. I was a little bit nervous actually,” said Martin. “And I got a little bit of a negative outreach from the regular community because there’s a lot of better poker players out there that didn’t market themselves as well, that didn’t gain an audience as well and PokerStars asked me and it was a tremendous blessing,”

One of the strengths of Martin’s stream is his ability to make himself relatable to almost anybody tuning in and not take himself too seriously. There may not have been a better display of that than last May when Martin got a knock on the door while streaming.

“It was last spring, I got a knock on the door and I’d just fired up a bunch of tournaments, and this very flamboyant Chinese man was asking for charity money, he was a charity worker. He was like, ‘Do you have time?’ I was like, ‘I don’t have time, but do you want to come in?’,” said Martin. “We invited him in and we ended up having drinks and this this flamboyant Chinese man drank at my house for four hours and we just got pretty loaded on stream, it was amazing.”

Rather than not answer the door at all or hurriedly send the charity worker on his way, Martin embraced the opportunity. After introdcing “Billy” on the stream, Martin played through his regular tournament schedule teaching Billy poker along the way. The more Martin and Billy talked over the course of the four hours, the more viewers Martin attracted.

Last month Martin, along with the Staples brothers and Gross, used their stream to give something back and ended up raising over $21,000 for charity.

“Gross was roommates with Michael Phelps, so he wanted to do something for his charity and we all got behind the idea. It was just instantly yes, yes, yes, yes. We actually thought of the idea on aFriday and we started it Sunday morning,” said Martin. The four players agreed to stream 24 hours a day for 7 days straight to raise money for the Michael Phelps Foundation.

“One of us was always live, Matt had the night shift, I had the evening shift, Jaime had the morning shift, Jeff had the afternoon shifts so he could play the high stakes, and yeah, we streamed for what, a hundred and eighty hours straight, the four of us,” said Martin. “People donated, a hundred percent of the donations went toward the foundation, we gave pieces of our tournaments when we ran deep.”

The streamathon was so well received and so successful that they’re already planning to do it again.

“It was amazing. It’s something I think we’re going to revisit, I mean we had a really big success there, I think we’re just going to chill, do our own streams, and possibly put something together this spring,” said Martin.