POTD #118 AK Week Part 3: Blind vs Blind in the PCA $100k Super High Roller

A punt and a suckout and I look thrilled.

There’s an old Mel Brooks line, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die," and this maxim can easily be ported onto poker tournaments. No one cares about your bad beat story, but mine… So there is a bias in the hands I cover here at POTD. I rarely write about hands where I punted and won the maximum; one reason for that is these hands should belong to a rare subsection of hands where I punted— when I four-bet shove pocket deuces and get called, I will usually lose the hand. However, there is another reason for this: If one plays a hand poorly and wins it, they stay in the tournament, and the hands they remember from the tournament may be some other hands further along the tracks. If it’s your terminal hand, it might stick in your mind for a while.

In 2019, I won the Super High Roller at the PCA, and I do not remember a single hand that I played on day one. I remember some hands I played on stream on day 2, including a lowlight and a highlight. I remember getting extremely lucky at the final table, I secured a big chiplead by winning a massive pot with AA vs. Chris Hunichen’s AKo¹, and proceeded to cooler others left, right and centre, including flopping the nut straight vs. Jesus Cortes’s set to stack him. One of those hands was a hand where I sucked out vs. Joao Vieira. At the time, I thought I played the hand well. Upon further review, I think I made some key mistakes. Today, we will see who was right: 2019 Sam, 2025 Sam, both, or neither.

PCA 2019 $100k Super High Roller
250k Starting Stack (8k/16k/16k) (SB/BB/BBA) 15 Left 8 Cash

It folds to me in the SB with 781k, I make it 45k with A♣️K♦️, Joao Vieira (318k) call in the BB

Flop (106k) 6♠️6♦️3♣️: I bet 25k, he makes it 70k, I put him all-in for 273k total, he time bank calls with J♦️3♠️

The turn is the Q♠️ and the river is the A♠️