POTD #225 FT Friday: Making a Loose Call vs Benjamin "Spraggy" Spragg

A hand from the biggest FT (at the time) of his life. The $5k Pokerstars Stadium Series. (Photo: Spraggy's YouTube Channel)

A consistent bit of feedback I’ve gotten from POTD subscribers is a version of: “I am busy with my job and I rarely get an opportunity to play poker. I enjoy reading about your hands every day, because it allows me to think about poker daily, when life has made it impossible for me to play more than a couple times a year.” This vicarious relationship can also explain the rise in popularity of poker streamers, a group of people who have created extremely popular poker content that others watch, but I rarely do.

I don’t have a problem with poker streamers, but if I wanted to watch someone play poker, I’d just play myself. Speaking to POTD subscribers has helped me understand why streams are so popular, and their perspective has caused me to learn something, which is always appreciated. One recent new POTD subscriber is a popular streamer in his own right, Benjamin “Spraggy” Spragg, and when I read the notification that informed me that “Spraggy”¹ has subscribed to Punt of the Day in the Substack app, I had an immediate flashback to the most memorable hand I’d ever played vs. Spraggy.

At the time, with all due respect, I did not know who “Spraggy” was. I knew he was a popular streamer and a Stars pro. I knew he played lower stakes than I did, but my knowledge of the streaming community and the economics of streaming was lacking. As far as I knew, Spraggy had so many YouTube or Twitch subscribers that he was making more money than 99% of high rollers, and PokerStars was paying him Daniel Negreanu money. When I made the final table of a $5,200 Stadium Series on PokerStars, my opponents were the usual suspects, plus this streamer guy I heard so much about but had never actually played with. I was playing several other tables at the time and did not have the monitor space to pull up his stream, but had I done so, I would have gleaned some valuable information about how he was playing. I failed to do so and made a mistake that propelled Spraggy to the biggest cash of his life up until that point. The least he could do is repay my punt by subscribing to my Substack over five years later.

PokerStars Stadium Series Heat 25-H $5,200 NLHE
(20k/40k/5k) (SB/BB/ANTE). 95 Entries. 100k Starting stack.
1st: 119k, 2nd: 92k, 3rd: 71k, 4th: 54k, 5th: 42k

Watlnos (136k) folds UTG, I (863k) make it 88k in the CO with A♦️T♦️, Mikita (3.14M) folds on the button, Spraggy (681k) goes all-in from the SB, Gordon0410 (4.64M folds in the BB), I call and lose to K♠️K♥️.