Last Friday evening, Espen Jorstad — the latest WSOP Main Event champion — made his first on-screen appearance since he won his first solo bracelet.
Jorstad sat down on Hustler Casino Live with $40,000 in front of him and Garrett Adelstein two seats to his right.
In his own words, he hadn't played cash for "ages" but he was soon in there mixing it up with some much more confident players.
The blinds were $100/$200 and it wasn't long before the $400 straddle was in play and Espen opened to $1,000 with T♠9♠ and got three-bet by J.R. with pocket jacks. It was a pretty standard hand without much in the way of complicated play, but it still cost Epsen a quarter of his stack.
It was a sign of things to come.
Tough competition
It was a pretty tough table for a tourney player to dive into. Garrett is the show's resident shark and prop-player, serving as a host and lure — in return for plenty of play time with L.A.'s poker fishies.
J.R. is a formidable razz player, though in this particular session he came out as the big donor of the table, doing off $136,000 before closing time.
Overall though, it was the cards that did Jorstad in as much as his opponents.
Jorstad played a pretty tight-aggressive game with a VPIP of 19% and a PFR of 12% at the end of the six hour session. The session still cost him a fair amount though. By the time the HCL software was tallying up the end-of-session stats, Espen was down $28,300.
Even so, it is nice to see Jorstad leaning into the role of world champion. It's a while since we've had a ME champ with Jorstad's combo of poker chops, charisma, and good looks. He has the potential to be a great ambassador for the game, and being happy to mix it up on high-stakes streams is a great start to his year of wearing the crown.
Here's hoping he will be back again for HCL's "High Stakes Week" which starts on Monday.
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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.
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