Isildur1 and Partik Antonius sure treated us to a very interesting PLO session last night. In the span of 5090 hands Isildur1 won almost $700K from Antonius. Not a huge amount considering the stakes and the number of hands, but the swings that we saw during this session were quite a lot bigger than the end result indicates.
The diagram above shows the running total in the match as seen from Isildur1’s point of view. He had two major peaks, one at $1.7M and the next at $1.5M after Antonius had fought his way back to being ‘just’ $550K down. After this, however, the tide turned in favor of Antonius, and in the next 2000 hands he won almost two million dollars. What happened next really speaks to Isildur1’s as he managed to come back and win over one million dollars over the last 800 hands. Of course he was running very well over that span, but most players would not be able to play their A-game after bleeding for so long, so they would not be around to take advantage of the next rush.
Isildur1 flops a wrap draw and turns the nut straight to win a $555K pot
The largest pot of the session came quite early in the almost 13 hour long session. After the usual scrimmage before the flop, Isildur1 flopped the wrap draw which is very strong, particularly on a rainbow flop like this one. Antonius’ call of Isildur1’s check raise seems very marginal, but he probably found it quite likely that Isildur1 had two pairs here, and if so, he would have nine winners plus a backdoor flush draw to fall back on. Being in position would also ensure that he would get paid off since Isildur1 would definitely bet the turn to protect his hand.
The downside to Antonius call can be clearly seen on this hand, since he hit his two pairs only to see that the same card gave Isildur1 the nuts. And when a blank came off on the river, Antonius was left wishing he had the good sense to fold his hand on the flop.
Antonius flops top two pairs which holds up against Isildur1 many draws. $538K pot.
In this hand, Isildur1 took a little bit different line than we usually see from him. After 3-betting the flop, he decided against making a continuation bet and instead check and call despite having a flush draw and a pair. That he only held bottom pair and basically the smallest flush draw possible probably had something to do with this decision. However once he hit two pairs and the guts-hot straight draw on the turn, he decided to play the hand more aggressively.
From Antonius point of view, this line must have seen very strong, and he must have feared that he was up against a set, but we have seen time and again that these guys do not lay down top two pairs in these situations, so he decided to go with his hand. When the cards were on their backs, Antonius was not even a 3-2 favorite to win the hand, but he managed to fade all of Isildur1’s winners and take down a nice pot.
After the previous days’ action, it was interesting to see that there were no pots getting even close to the stratospheric levels we have seen lately. There were a couple of times that the players both had a lot of chips at the same table, but more than once they decided to move to a new table and start with their original stacks again.
On a side note: I don’t know if Isildur1 is superstitious, but if he is, he should stay as far away from the table ‘Royal Guard’ as possible. Over the time we have been recording his results, he has lost no less than 7.2 million dollars at that table. Instead he should make sure he is playing at one of the four PLO tables he his winnings exceed one million: Monarch Bay, Bracken, Apple Cider and (surprise, surprise) durrrr…
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