It seems like the whole poker world is talking about a hand on the new season of High Stakes Poker between Sam 'Senor Tilt' Kiki and Darin Feinstein.
The question asked by many – including Doug Polk and Charlie Carrel – is whether Kiki deliberately pulled an angle.
The controversy unfolded on the river, with $188,000 already in the pot. Both players had a pair, but Feinstein’s kings topped Kiki’s sevens.
- Kiki:
- Feinstein:
- Board:
As Kiki mulled his decision, Feinstein looked at him and said, "I'll probably fold if you bet."
Kiki then reached for a tall stack of $5,000 chips and pushed them forward – a move that typically indicates a bet. The chips stayed in his hand the entire time but clearly crossed the betting line and even appeared to touch the felt at one point.
Feinstein, meanwhile, grabbed some chips as if he was going to make a quick call.
Seeing this, Kiki pulled his hand back, returned the chips to his stack, and checked.
Feinstein laughed at the pantomime – a little confused, but seemingly unbothered – and turned over his cards to win the pot.
Commentator Nick Schulman reacted, saying, "Oh boy, that's a... that's a little bit... Well, he sort of motioned forward, and it looked like... they're in the wild now."
Doug Polk: 'This is clearly a bet'
After some debate online, Polk and Carrel released investigative videos on their YouTube channels. Both players acknowledged the game's setting – a private, high-stakes lineup with relaxed standards – but both said the bet should have stood.
"In my opinion, this is clearly a bet," Polk said. "Regardless of whether it's a hard betting line, he's over the line. Or, if it's forward motion, he's clearly made forward motion."
"What is especially bad to me is if we pause, just frame-by-frame, the frame of him putting the bet over the line: this is a bet," Polk continued. "But then if we go a couple of frames forward, we can see that he looks over and sees that Feinstein is going to make the call, he has the chips in his hand. And that's when he recognizes I'm going to lose this money, and so instead he decides to pull it back and play it off like it was a joke."
"It's a private game, the rules are a little bit more lax," Carrel said. "It can't be unintentional though because he saw the guy was about to put the chips [in]. I think he has to give him the money. I think he owes him $100K."
Kiki defends his actions
Kiki responded directly to Polk in a post on X, saying it was "sad" that Polk used the hand "for clickbait." He added that he and Feinstein have been playing poker "and shooting dice" with one another for several years.
"We are used to home games where we do all sorts of this BS," he wrote.
Kiki went on to say that he pulled the move intentionally, but only after Feinstein had, in his eyes, similarly angled.
"No one also points out that Darin angled and said, 'If you bet, I will fold,' after the river card dropped, which is also not a good look had I decided to bet and he called," Kiki continued. "So I wanted to angle and see what he was up to."
"It was some playful screwing around between friends, and everyone was laughing," Kiki concluded. "Doug knows that, but the fact that it didn’t stop him from making that video says a lot about him."
Polk followed up with his own reply shortly afterward.
Featured image courtesy of Antonio Abrego/PokerGO
