Andy Stacks: “I felt like I had a good grasp throughout the entire hand on every street. I was actually fairly confident at the time that this bluff on the river was going to get through.”
Andy Stacks and Martin Kabrhel played a massive pot on the Hustler Casino Live stream on November 30, 2023. In the video below, Andy talks through the hand step-by-step, providing exclusive insight into the thought process of a high-stakes cash game player.
The hand
The blinds were $200/$400/$400, plus a big blind ante of $400 and an $800 straddle. Andy had $569,400 in front of him, Kabrhel $318,600. The game only had a few hours left in it; Andy was down, and Kabrhel was being his usual talkative self.
“I started off this session losing some significant pots,” Andy tells us. ”I kind of knew in the game that I should probably take a short break and come back more focused. But I didn't do that…I knew his [Kabrhel's] whole spiel of trying to throw players off their game by constantly talking to tilt them. In hindsight now, I think it would have been best to never have engaged with him. My rhythm and focus were definitely off.”
The aftermath
To compound Andy Stack’s frustration, the game broke early after this hand, with players leaving to go to another home game and Kabrhel leaving for a meeting. Andy wasn’t aware of the situation, and this is what he had to say:
“Nick [Airball] and Santhosh [Survana] left together. The floorman came and started racking both of their chips, and I'm just like, “What is going on?” I had no idea what was going on at the time, and the floorman just said, “They’re leaving,” with no explanation. Obviously, I was very confused. I asked Professor, “What's going on?” and he was like, “Yeah, I think they're going to a home game.” I knew this was going to break the game.
"Martin all of a sudden said he’d got a meeting to go to. I honestly think he was trolling, he knew what he was doing. He was doing it to tilt us even more. He knows we know he’s not going to a meeting. He's just saying, “Yeah, I'm quitting. What are you going to do about it?” This is fine, whatever, he didn’t want to sit in.
"So Martin left, Professor left, Raymond left, and it was just me, Jungle and Rampage stuck in the game. That was brutal."
“I was told later that Ryan [Feldman][from HCL] told everybody that this was going to happen and they were going to leave early. But then he was like, “Oh, I forgot to tell you.” It was a miscommunication, is what they're saying. I think someone needs to make a decision to let the table know at the start of the game who is leaving early and at what time, but that wasn't done.
"And the frustration came because this isn't the first time that this has happened to me on Hustler. There was another game I played recently where the same thing happened: a player won a gigantic pot off me, coolering me with aces versus queens, and soon after, he decided to rack up and said, “I have to go,” and there’s still like two hours left of the stream. It’s really frustrating. We were already shorthanded, and again, the action just evaporated."
“I never think it's obligatory to force someone to play, especially if they're losing. But I do think it's the responsibility of the stream to do whatever they can to make sure the game doesn't break and players that are signed up stay for the full five or six hours. There's a lot of competition to get a seat. It's not like a regular game where you put your name up and get called. This is a business for them, and if you leave, you're essentially affecting the image of their business, making them look bad.
"I think it's fair to require players when they sign up to commit for the five hours, or whatever it is, and players should only leave under special circumstances, and that should be communicated to all the players...When you know the game is going to break soon, it affects people’s game. Perhaps I started to force things a bit. It’s a bad habit of mine that I need to cut out."
