POTD #274 A Hand from My First Post-Covid Super High Roller
Better not do something stupid
In January of 2020, I went to Australia to play the Aussie Millions in Melbourne and then the Australian Poker Open tournaments in Gold Coast. The APO tournament turnouts were just okay, and there were also news stories about something called COVID-19 cases found in Australia. I had been away from home for a long time and was planning on going to Jeju for Triton Jeju in mid-February, but I found a cheap business class flight home from Brisbane that I decided to take. I flew back on January 25th Australia time, which I can easily look up because I woke up to the news that Kobe Bryant had died in a helicopter crash. I flew back to Toronto and planned on being home for a couple weeks before I jetted off to Korea for Triton Jeju.
In the following weeks, I had learned that Triton Jeju was cancelled due to this COVID-19 thing, but that it would be replaced with a joint Party Poker Live and Triton series in Sochi, Russia.1 At the time, I did not realize it was the last time in a long time I’d be playing live poker, and I certainly did not realize it would be an even longer time before I played poker in Sochi, which is a poker stop I liked quite a bit. It should have been an ominous sign that I might not stay for the whole trip, when I landed in Moscow and all the customs agents were decked out in movie-style hazmat suits, but I stayed until the end and was able to fly back to Toronto in part because Party Poker generously let the players fly from Sochi to London on their chartered jet. Getting back to Toronto from London was easy. After that day, March 16th 2020, I did not play live poker until I played the November 2021 World Series of Poker Main Event; after that day, I did not play live poker until Triton announced a special series in Cyprus in April 2022. I was itching to play some high-stakes poker and rub elbows with my competition, many of whom I hadn’t seen in over two years. The muscle memory of playing live poker came back pretty quickly— things like peeling cards and playing with chips all seemed very natural to me— but “seemed” is the operative word in that sentence. I still had a lot of rust that needed to be cleaned up, and I ended up making a costly mistake at an inopportune time.
Triton Poker Cyprus Special Edition 2022 - Event #2 $100k NLH 8-Handed
(SB/BB/BBA) (10k/15k/15k) 20/69 Left. 9 Cash. 9th is 192k.
Nick Petrangelo (486k/32bbs) makes it 35k UTG/7, I (307k/20bbs) make it 75k next to act with K♥️T♥️, Elton Tsang (567k/38bbs) makes it 150k next to act, it folds back to me and I call.
Flop (375k) K♠️J♠️5♠️: I check, Elton bets 50k, I jam for 157k total, Elton calls and I lose to A♠️K♣️.
