Kevin Martin Retires From Streaming

Popular poker pro, Twitch streamer, Team partypoker Online icon and former Big Brother star, Kevin Martin has called it a day from playing poker online. The surprise announcement came last week after the 26-year-old Canadian reflected that he has gone as far as he can in the online version of the game he loves.

As ever the star of social media, he took to his channels to make his announcement and, in a post on Instagram, he admits that this is the natural conclusion to his online poker story and that he was now ready to move on.

Reasons for his retirement

Alongside Jason Somerville and Jaime Staples, Martin was one of the pioneers of live streaming on Twitch where his channel grew to boast 84.307 subscribers. He achieved this following after launching his career with a bankroll of only $8,000 in 2015, a score that has since swollen considerably thanks in part to $313,687 in live career earnings.

His biggest ever win online came courtesy of a chop in PokerStars Mini Sunday Million for $22,000, while on the live circuit, where he has been focusing more of late, his biggest ever cash came in October last year when he came second in the Run It Up Reno Main Event for $48,210.

All this followed his 2018 self-dubber “Summer of Absolute Glory” where he went on a two month heater winning three Canadian tourneys along the way. And while this summer didn’t quite live up to the expectations of the last, the player still plans to play a ton of live poker.

Already he has announced plans to take on January’s $25,000 Players Championship in the Bahamas along with concentrating on breaking into some other high-stakes games from buy-ins of $10,000 a shot.

The player himself had this to say;

“The journey is over. I'll be around, I'll still play poker a ton, a little more recreationally and I'll be around on some Twitch streams once in a while. But for me as a content creator, the journey is finished."

Life After Poker

One potential new career option for Martin might be television. In 2015, he entered into, and won while collecting $130,000, Canada’s version of Big Brother at the second attempt having taken part in the series two years prior. Even during his unsuccessful first attempt his happy attitude, which would prove to be the key to his Twitch success, made him popular enough to be evicted without receiving a single nomination.

During his second stint in the house, he risked upsetting the show’s producers after he continuously name dropped various brand names, including his then sponsor, PokerStars. In all Martin spent almost three years as part of Team PokerStars Pro Online before leaving in February 2019.

Soon after, in May of the same year, Martin signed on to Team partypoker Online together with his close friends Jeff Gross and the Staples brothers, Jaime and Matt, which makes his swift retirement just four months later all the more out of the blue.