(Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
If you want to watch something as brutal as MMA, as calculated as golf, and as emotionally exhilarating as a game seven, you may want to check out this season’s High Stakes Poker. The men slugging it out range in age from 22 to 75, and most look like they couldn’t bench-press a deck of cards. But the carnage that they have inflicted on one another has been intense. It is psychological warfare at its finest.
Which means that, if you are like me, this is must-see TV.
HSP is the largest televised cash game with a buy-in of a minimum $200,000. With eight of the best poker players around playing No-Limit Hold’em, there’s a minimum of $1.6 million on the table and pots in the six-figure range. With this much money at stake, and with players whose ego may be a big as their bankroll, things were bound to get brutal.
So let’s recap the pain so far, six weeks into Season 5.
In a hand that has reverberations throughout the game, 22-year-old Internet phenom Tom “durrrr” Dwan took the worst hand and bullied the table into folding to him, netting him over $200,000 in just one hand.
The hand started as a family pot after well-respected poker pro Barry Greenstein min-raised from under-the-gun with pocket aces, only to have seven callers. The flop came 2-10-2 and Greenstein’s aces were now behind reigning-WSOP Main Event champion Peter Eastgate, who was holding 4-2.
After Eastgate checked the flop, Greenstein bet $10,000. Dwan, in third place with Q-10, re-raised to $37,300. Both Eastgate and Greenstein called and the rest of the table folded.
The turn was a seven and it was checked to Dwan, who bet a whopping $104,200. As poker announcer Gabe Kaplan said, Dwan had the weakest hand and the biggest heart. The gutsy bet got Eastgate to muck his trips and Greenstein to lay down his aces.
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