The last month or so has seen a flurry of action at the highest stakes on GGPoker.
If you log into GGPoker at random, the $400/800, $500/$1,000, and $1,000/$2,000 tables on the site are frequently just decorative. Most days you can see one or more of Linus Loeliger, Andras Nemeth, or Wiktor Malinowski camped out as player 1/6 for a few hours.
That might give a misleading sense of how active the nosebleed have been of late. A few times a week, there are enough players willing to take them on to get a real game going with action to the pre-Black Friday boom-days.
Last week's game, for example, saw Andras Nemeth turn $100k into $561k during one five-hour session. That final total would have been almost $1 million but for a brutal $368k pot lost to a bad beat on the river against high stakes regular "atlasatlas."
Nemeth mopped up at the $500/$1k PLO table (with a $2k straddle towards the end). Meanwhile, Malinowski and Loeliger were harpooning a couple of whales (and "atlasatlas" again) on a $500/$1k NLH table (also with a $2k straddle for much of the time).
After five hours of high stakes play, the tables closed from lack of activity, and the quiet returned to the felt.
See the $368k pot at the time stamp below:
The quiet renaissance of nosebleed poker
Many of us remember the halcyon days of Tom Dwan's online debut, the mystery of who "Isildur" was, and seeing the Ivey/Negreanu/Antonius-axis battling it out on Full Tilt and Stars's biggest tables.
Then Black Friday came and the action dried up. Ivey moved to Macau. Negreanu leaned harder on his role as a media personality. Tom Dwan disappeared into a Yakuza basement. The lights went out across the online cash tables.
Now, we seem to be seeing them lit again, slowly but surely.
Last year saw the record for biggest online hold'em hand beaten and then beaten again. Last month, we saw the biggest cash game pot ever played online take place on CoinPoker where a regular $1k/$2k is held most Sundays. Last week Tony G had a $3.5 million session playing $5k/$10k PLO.
The last week or so has seen the action taper off on both GGPoker and CoinPoker. Most likely this was because many of the high rollers were hitting up the U.S. Poker Open.
But we expect it to be back in a big way ahead of the WSOP.
Get in touch
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: GGPoker
