Brad Owen's latest vlog takes his viewers inside Legends Room (née Bobby's Room) at the Bellagio. The room has been the home to The Big Game for decades and houses the rest of the Bellagio's high stakes poker tables when The Big Game isn't in session.
For privacy reasons, Owen can't shoot a great deal of coverage in the room. So, most of what the viewer gets is just Owen's own chips and cards. But he does take us through the action at the $100/$100 table he played at, giving us a glimpse of the play at some of the highest regularly available stakes in Vegas.
In the hectic pre-amble the viewer gets an insight into the process of drumming up cash on short notice (he brought a $5/$10 knife to a $100/$100 gunfight). Eventually, the room manager spots him a pair of flags — as the red, white, and blue Bellagio $5k chips are known — and he hops into the game.
It took Owen less than an hour to get up by $11k. That number dwindled over the rest of the session as a few big pots, errors in play, and 7-2 payouts took their toll.
He finished up about $2k to the good.
Brad Owen rising up the stakes
As well as taking shots in some higher stakes games, Owen has also started a new sponsorship deal as a brand ambassador for the WPT.
The first big jump in stakes on his vlog was an episode titled "I Play The BIGGEST Game & BIGGEST Pots Of My Life!!" In this video he played the $100/$200 no-limit hold'em game at The Lodge in Texas, of which Owen is a part owner.
Echoing the shot taken by Mike McDermott in Rounders, Owen bought into The Lodge game for three stacks of high society, allowing himself to add-on up to $100,000 if needed. He also mentions that he sold 20% of his action, giving someone a reasonably hairy $6k-20k sweat on the session.
Doug Polk was already in the game, looking like these live sessions at the Lodge might have re-ignited some of his lost enjoyment for the game.
No one at the table was in for less than $30k meaning the effective stacks were no smaller than 150 big blinds. This gives the better players room to exercise their edge. Owen had to hope he was one of them.
In that game he managed to finish up down just a few big blinds. Feeling he had held his own he took the opportunity, when offered, of playing a game like that again in Vegas.
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Poker.org covers the highest stakes poker action live and online. If you have spotted and/or taken part in any high-stakes action that you feel should be covered here, please contact Jon Pill at jonpillwrites(at)outlook.com.
Please put “HIGH STAKES” in the subject line and put any relevant information in the body of the email. If possible please include information about the location/site of the game if live, any hand histories, dates/times, and in the case of streamed content any relevant links or timestamps.
Featured image source: WPT via Flickr, used under CC license.
