Tuesday
November 17, 2009
It was bound to happen one of these days, and it was a virtual certainty that Isildur1 would be involved. Unfortunately for him, he was on the losing end of the biggest pot ever recorded in online poker. The game was $500/$1000, and the opponent was, as most of you will have heard by now, Patrik Antonius.
Take me to the hand! ($878,959)
You would think that the largest pot ever would start out being 5-bet pre flop with both players hitting the flop hard, but that wasn’t the case on this hand. Surprisingly, it there was just a simple raise and a call that got the action underway. On the flop, Antonius hits top pair the nut flush draw and a gut shot draw, and makes a raise over Isildur1’s continuation bet, and this is probably where Isildur1 could have gotten away from the hand. I am not sure about his call after Antonius raise, since it is very unlikely that he is ahead, and if Isildur1 should be up against a set, he is virtually drawing dead. Of course, his opponent’s range is very wide at this stage, so it is hard for me to say whether it is correct or not.
When the ace comes on the turn, Isildur1 has very little choice but to play the hand the way he did. The turn was basically exactly what he was looking for, so to not play the hand aggressively at that stage would make little sense. Of course, he might be up against a set, as I mentioned earlier, but this decision was really made when he called the raise on the flop. Besides, he figures to have as many as 10 winners if Antonius did indeed flop a set, so there would still be some equity there for Isildur1. For Antonius, the decision was not very hard either. He could very well have the best hand, but if he hasn’t, he will have many outs.
So, there they are. All in on the turn, with a split pot as the most likely option, but with both players with chances to scoop the pot, and though the turn comes fairly quickly, I am sure the suspense made this second feel very long. And I don’t know about Isildur1, bit if it had been sitting there, I am not sure if I had registered immediately that the eight of diamonds would ship the pot to my opponent. Mostly, he is fearing a heart, so there might have been a moment where he was thinking ‘split pot’. Seeing the chips being shipped to Antonius must have been a sombre feeling , regardless. I don’t know if being part of the biggest hand ever feels like any comfort in this spot.
Isildur1 flops top set and rivers a full house to take a $587K pot from Brian Townsend.
Even if Patrik Antonius won the largest pot ever, the hand wasn’t even the largest of the day in terms of size relative to the blinds. That honour goes to Isildur1 who won this hand when playing $300/$600 against Brian Townsend. A grand total of 979 big blinds, of close to five full buy-in’s went into this hand, and it is a shame that we are not shown Townsend’s hand here. I suspect he flopped a lower set and was slow-playing it until the river.
I guess we will never know, but I am sure that Isildur was very happy about how the action exploded on the end
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