We have just witnessed possibly the longest and wildest head up PLO game ever seen at PokerStars as Ben "Sauce123" Sulsky and Viktor "Isildur1" Blom faced off across four tables of $200/$400 PLO with antes, playing for a staggering fifteen hours non stop. The match featured a staggering 85 pots of over $100k.
The match was won pretty convincingly by Sauce who ended up bagging a $605k win over the 6,500 hands the two played out overnight. However, as you would expect in a game as volatile and frantic as this (especially if your opponents name is Viktor Blom) there were a few twists in the tale.
Prior to the match kicking off, Isildur1 had already been a busy boy at the highstakes tables. He started the day in fine form, taking around $100k from the FLO8 games against arbianight and then around $250k playing $50/$100 PLO with EireAbu. His day tailed off a little however as his return to the FLO8 tables in an early evening session didn't go quite according to plan and he dropped around $250k of his days winnings during a two hour session. Still in profit for the day however Blom then took on one of the best HU PLO players around (and one of Bloms victims from the previous day) Ben "Sauce123" Sulsky.
Nobody could have predicted that this game would last so long and be so potentially devastating - especially as Blom had been playing practically non stop for two days.
It was an ominous start as Blom lost $200k in the first 60 hands of play - a horrible start. However, things soon picked up for the online legend as over the course of the next 1000 or so hands he steamrollered his US opponent and hit a $650k upswing, putting him around $450k in profit for the match. At this point Blom was around $1.6 million up since Friday. Things were to change drastically however and over the course of 3,500 hands it was all downhill as Sauce123 piled on the pressure, called off Blom's regular pot sized river bluffs and played a better game. By the 4.7k hand mark in the game Blom had pretty much lost everything he had won over the previous 3 days - and he was exhausted. By this point Sauce123 was on a $1.1 million profit from the game. Cue a mini-comeback as down to pretty much his final buy ins he went on a $650k upswing, splitting tables whenever his stack reach six figures and starting afresh.
As a spectator I was by now urging Blom to quit the tables and be happy with his long weekends work. That's not Blom's style of course and even quicker than he'd won it back he lost it all again. Down to the very last of his roll (sometimes down to three tables) and running on empty he was somehow able to rally once again and in the dying stages made a $500k comeback. Finally he could do no more, and after witnessing Sauce limping on the button a little too often for his liking Blom announced that he was too tired to play like that, having earlier denied Sauce the chance to go and make a cup of coffee as he was too tired to wait for him to come back!! He also told Sulsky that he hadn't slept in three days!
As reported the match contained 85 six figure pots and here are the top three;
Isildur1 snap calls this shove on the turn, knowing he at least had outs and his bravodo pays off as he takes down this $204k pot
Both players flop good hands and draws, Sauce seals it on the turn and his river improvement is irrelevant - $191.5k pot
Sauce just calls with his full house on the river to take this $191k pot
Check out all the biggest pots here.
So the match ended with Sauce a $605k winner and, unusually in such a high variance game the all in EV figures broke pretty much exactly even, and after his rallying performance in the final few hundred hands Viktor "Isildur1" Blom is still in the hunt and has still managed to bag close to half a million dollars in winnings since Friday.
A good return rate for a few days work in anybody's book but it was certainly a very, very long weekend for the young Swede, and a great night for Ben Sulsky.
Winners for Monday*
Sauce123 +$426k, mtvdeum +$148.3, madmags4 +$115.8k
* Results don't contain up to date figures for Sauce123 as the game reported went well into Tuesday before it's conclusion