Name: Moolah, greenbacks, ‘f**k you’ money.
Age: 19.
Appearance: One happy player, one mad player, and a whole lot of chips moving in one direction.
Kind of a random topic this week. Are we talking ceramics or earthenware, here? Oh, you know what you did. We’re talking about the biggest cash game pots ever screened to the watching world. Obviously.
That’s easy, I just saw Michael Mizrachi win $10M last month at the WSOP Main Event. That was huge, sure, but that was a tournament. The chips in play are just tokens, it wasn’t real money they were betting with. Prior to High Stakes Poker in 2006, pretty much every televised poker game was a tournament.
What are we talking here, a million dollars? You're kidding, right? That milestone was passed a long time ago.
How long ago? Let's just say it was in an event sponsored by Full Tilt Poker. A young Phil Ivey lost a $1.1 million pot to an even younger Tom Dwan in a straight-over-straight situation.
So what’s the biggest ever cash game pot? Up until this week it was a pot played between Tom Dwan (yep, him again) and Wesley Fei a couple of years ago, streamed online at Hustler Casino Live.
How big? $3.1 million. Dwan won the pot with a pair of queens — his opponent was bluffing with ace-high on a dangerous looking board.
Wow, Fei must have felt that one. No doubt, but not for long; later in the same game he won what was the second biggest ever televised pot, worth $2.2 million.
What did you mean by ‘up until this week’? Because things just changed: we’re through the looking glass now, people. Finnish millionaire Ossi Ketola has issued a challenge to the super high roller community, and let’s just say he likes to play big pots. The record for the biggest ever televised cash game pot just got destroyed in Cyprus, and who knows how long this record will stand.
So how big was this one? €7.7 million.
Yikes! Let me guess: Set over set over set in a three-way perfect storm against Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk? Not even close. This was a heads-up affair between Ketola (
) and Dan ‘Jungleman’ Cates (
). They’d each put in €1.4 million preflop, before it was checked through to the turn. Cates bet another €1.2M and Ketola called, making €5.5 million in the middle. At the river the board showed 
, Ketola jammed for his last €2.5M and Cates folded.
Wow. Jungleman must have cried all the way home. Unlikely. He actually ended the night a big winner. After that big hand he won a pot worth €4.8 million when he made a stronger two-pair than Ketola and made the right call on the river. By the end of the night he was up around €13 million.
Not a great week for Ketola then? You can say that again. He lost €2 million to Kayhan Mokri the night before.
Where have I heard his name before? He first appeared on the high roller scene in 2024, making final tables at Triton Monte Carlo and then WSOP Paradise. He has no recorded results playing for anything below $44,000.
It’s rare for a super high roller to appear out of nowhere. Tell that to the man who defeated Ketola heads-up at his first Triton stop: Vladimir ‘Gambledore’ Korzinin.
Is this money even real? That's pretty cynical, but it's an understandable reaction when faced with amounts this large. As far as anyone can tell, this is real money we're talking about, and we're not sure why a high roller like Jungleman would stay up all night to win play money.
So what’s next for Ketola? ‘What’, or ‘who’? Either way, we wouldn’t be totally surprised if that ‘biggest pot’ record set last night gets broken soon.
Do say: “Well done, now you can afford to buy 3 private islands in Finland...”
Don’t say: “...or one handbag.”
